Results tagged “Obama” from Intelligent Travel Blog

As an intern trying to make the most of her summer in the capital, I'm always on the lookout for cool things to see and do. The Smithsonians? Check. Free concerts at the Kennedy Center? I'm there. I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I was invited to tour the Holy Grail of D.C. destinations, the cherry on top of the Executive sundae--the West Wing of the White House (above).

This is not an opportunity that comes along every day. Tours of the White House's East Wing can be arranged through your representatives in Congress anywhere between six months to 30 days in advance. But the West Wing takes a little something extra. You have to know a White House staffer... so when a friend asked if I'd be interested in seeing where President Obama goes to work every day, I jumped at the chance.

Having seen pretty much every episode of NBC's "The West Wing" ever made, I started out half expecting to run into Leo McGarry in the hallway or pass Mrs. Landingham's desk on my way to see the President. Brace yourself, reader: it's not how it looks on TV. Don't get me wrong, the West Wing is still incredibly cool. But everything, from the corridors to the Oval Office, is a lot smaller than any fictional version of it I've ever seen.
 
Official photos of the President and the First Family covered the walls as we made our way through the hallways, past staffers' closed office doors and at least four guard stations. Every once in a while a new batch of pictures is put up, and the old ones make their way into people's offices.
 
For all that it doesn't look the same as in the movies, once in a while we passed something instantly recognizable: the Rose Garden, the Cabinet Room, and finally, the Oval Office. I'm not going to lie: it's pretty awesome to look up and realize you're standing in front of a place you've been seeing in pictures your entire life.

Lynda Bird Johnson packs her camp trailer prior to her western trip. From the December, 1965 issue of National Geographic Magazine, by David Boyer/NGS.

This weekend President Obama and the First Family are heading to Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Parks, in part to promote this summer's final fee-free weekend at over 100 parks that usually charge admission. With his visit, the President hopes to continue the tradition of Presidential visits to the parks, and encourage the preservation and conservation of our natural landscapes. If this trip sparks anything like the mass crowds now flocking to the Obama-visited burger joints here in Washington, D.C., the President will have done his job.

This will be the first visit to either park for Obama's daughters Sasha and Malia, but not the first time a First Daughter has made such a trip. In 1965, Lynda Bird Johnson, daughter of LBJ, caravanned across America's interior taking National Geographic Magazine along for the ride. Here's an excerpt from the article, "I See America First: Diary of the President's Daughter," that we dug out of our archives.

Our Ancestors saw the West in a covered wagon. I saw it in the covered wagon's successor, the travel trailer.

In late June we rolled away from the Grand Canyon with the keepsake memory of a sunrise Sunday worship service beside its awesome rim. For two days we lingered in Monument Valley, an American Stonehenge sculptured by nature. We climbed amid the cliffside homes of ancient Indians at Wetherill Mesa, celebrated Fourth of July with a parade at Laramie, and in Jackson Hole floated down the Snake River on a raft.

We applauded Old Faithful at Yellowstone, parked for the night among tombstones where Custer, his men of the 7th Cavalry, and his stubborn foes--the Sioux and Cheyenne--died at the Little Bighorn River, and paused in homage at Theodore Roosevelt's crude cabin in his memorial park. We waded the Mississippi River where it trickles out of Lake Itasca, and canoed on the inviting waters of northern Minnesota.

Though our trailers covered 2,900 miles--about the distance from Paris to Jerusalem--we had hardly begun to see America. To see it all would take a lifetime.

President Obama recently signed a bill that would create a trail from Montana's Glacier National Park (above) to the Pacific Ocean at Washington's Cape Alava. The 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail is part of the "dream of a transcontinental pathway across America," according to Ron Strickland, who proposed the Pacific Northwest Trail in 1970. He hopes to see a trail connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic become a reality by the 50th anniversary of the National Trails System in 2018, according to AP.

Portions of the trail already exist, and the Pacific Northwest Trail Association has been maintaining those parts for many years. The complete trail will pass through three national parks--Glacier, North Cascades and Olympic--and seven national forests, and will be the only national scenic trail that connects two other international trails--the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico to Canada, passing through California, Oregon, and Washington, and the Continental Divide Trail, which connects Mexico and Canada by way of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.

The Pacific Northwest Trail was officially designated on March 30, when Obama signed a public lands bill that also created the Arizona National Scenic Trail and the New England National Scenic Trail, bringing the total number of national trails to eleven. It has been some 26 years since any additions to the national scenic trails system have been made.

Photo: Steve Geer/iStockphoto.com

We discussed it late last year, but now it's actually happened: President Obama has taken the first step in loosening the travel restrictions to Cuba.

The new policy is three-pronged. It will allow unlimited access for Cuban-Americans returning to the country to visit family, will enable more satellite and cellular communication services to be used on the island, and will also allow for people in the States to send as much money as they like to family members in Cuba (so long as they are not members of the Communist party) and will no longer limit the gift package restrictions. 

According to the AP, travel agents have already been swarmed with calls from people looking to visit:

Miami travel agent Tesie Aral said her phone has been ringing nonstop in anticipation of the announcement, with a tenfold increase last Friday alone.

"People were already planning to travel more based on their ability to go every 12 months," said Aral, owner of ABC Charters. "Whether they can travel more frequently than that depends on the economy."

[via Huffington Post, Washington Post, New York Times]

Photo: ChrisGoldNY via the Intelligent Travel Flickr pool

Jenn Blatty is our newest Traveler photo intern, and she is also a former U.S. Army Engineer Officer who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since those are two places that we hear about in the news constantly, but where few of us travel, we asked her to share some of her experiences while she was deployed there.

Iraq is a controversial topic; increasingly so now with a new President making new decisions about our military. But it's also a place that has left a large percentage of travelers asking a different set of questions, other than whether  our military stay or go. Instead, they are asking: What is it like there? What are the people like? Or will it be open to travel in my lifetime? I am certainly not a professional in the matter, but there is one experience I would like to share as it made me realize how close in nature we really are to the Iraqis, and that many of them ask the same questions about us.  

A deployment into Iraq begins in Kuwait, where soldiers spend about two weeks preparing for movement north. Our movement north was to Tallil Air Base, an old Iraqi airfield that was about 20 kilometers from the city of An Nasiriyah, and walking distance from the historical remains of the ancient city of Ur.

Because we were a Combat Heavy Engineer unit (in civilian words, a construction unit), we were in a constant need of materials. I was the contractor for my unit, and once a week I would travel into downtown Nasiriyah with a team to purchase a "shopping list" of immediate needs from the local Iraqi vendors.

President's Day is fast approaching, and with our nation's (and the world's) newfound fascination with the Commander in Chief, there's a heap of places you can put your presidential passions to educational use.

Drive down Highway 288 South near Houston, Texas, and you can catch a glimpse of six presidents of gigantic proportions. The 18- to 20-foot-tall busts of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and George H. W. Bush (a Houston native) were sculpted by David Adickes and will soon become part of Presidential Park. When the park opens in September, all 43 presidents (that's right--Obama might be the 44th, but Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, thus making 44 presidencies but only 43 presidents) will be on display. Obama's bust will be unveiled on February 16.

No presidential site is more famous than Mount Rushmore (named after an attorney, oddly). Officially complete in the 1940s, the park gets some three million visitors a year. The park rangers there host plenty of guided walks and talks, so if you visit this month, be prepared for the cold. Walk the Presidential Trail to get up close to the mountain, and president buffs shouldn't miss the nearby National Presidential Wax Museum.

With Martin Luther King Jr. Day upon us, it's time to enact the dormant civic idealism awakened by Obama's campaign slogan, "Change," and serve our communities on our day off next Monday, January 19th.

If you're in D.C. for the inauguration, you can take part in any number of volunteer opportunities. Greater D.C. Cares is organizing over 500 volunteers to help out in six local public schools, painting lockers, classrooms, and touching up murals. We Feed Our People, in conjunction with the Mayor's Office on Volunteerism, will serve warm meals to over 400 people while hosting a health fair. And the D.C. government has compiled a list of community service projects for this year's MLK Day of Service. Projects range from serving breakfast to the homeless, winterizing a fishpond at a community health clinic, tutoring a child, cleaning up a park, or sorting donated food at a food bank. You can volunteer all day or just an hour or two.

Check out the MLK Day of Service website to search their database of volunteer opportunities throughout the country to find a project in your area. Or visit Obama's own service site to pop in your zip code, and find a project that matches your availability and skills.

Are you volunteering next Monday? What projects are available in your city?

Photo: Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial, by Paul Schitzer via Life Magazine Archive

Late last night, President-elect Barack Obama officially arrived in Washington. He and his family are staying at the Hay-Adams Hotel for the time being before moving into the White House, in order to get the first daughters settled and started in school. Several papers have reported that the Obamas are anticipating their transition to Washington with a mix of excitement and nerves, so we at Traveler decided to do our best to help them get settled in D.C.

The Obama family spent a portion of their Christmas vacation in Hawaii, and, as the Washington Post reported this weekend, much of Obama's character is influenced by his Hawaiian upbringing. So Associate Editor Amy Alipio dug up the best ways to find a little aloha in Washington. From grabbing a plate lunch at Makakoa Enterprises to taking a hula class at the Joy of Motion dance studio, we've got a list of eateries, events, and opportunities that will help them make them feel at home.

For more tips on making the most of Washington D.C., be sure to check out our travel guide to the District's best offerings for the inauguration. 

Photo: Timothy Schenck/Istockphoto.com

The tanking international economy has led to a tourism downturn throughout the world, with the notable exception of Kenya, where safari operators are reporting brisk bookings following the November election of Barack Obama, whose father hailed from the town of Kogelo in the western part of the country.

"We've seen a 12 percent increase since November over the same period last year and our Web traffic is up 17 percent," says Dennis Pinto of Micato Safaris. "Given the prevailing economic conditions, we can only attribute this to the Obama factor." The Kenya Tourist Board also reports large increases in recent arrivals numbers.