He left the Hermitage on September 1st in his coach, and spent 24 days on the overland trip back to Washington. In the summer of 1831 he went, in company with his old friend Judge Overton, to the Rip Raps in Hampton Roads, near Norfolk. Both the old gentlemen were in bad health at the time, and they went to the rocky little island at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay for the beneficial effects of the sea bathing; but, unfortunately, there is not preserved a picture of Old Hickory in his bathing suit enjoying the Virginia surf. His next visit home was in the summer of 1832, when the place was lightened by the presence of young Andrew and his new bride. General Jackson left Washington on July 23rd and arrived at the Hermitage on August 15th, by the overland route. In September he visited Tyree Springs; but he was back in the White House October 19th, the return trip also being made by what was then known as “the Virginia route.” In June of 1833 Jackson took his celebrated trip to New York and New England—the famous occasion on which Harvard College conferred an LL.D. degree on the old warrior—but he was at the Rip Raps, enjoying the sea baths, in July and August. It was not until August, in the summer of 1834, that he made his next trip to the Hermitage; and by this time he was beginning to feel the crushing weight of the Presidency on his shoulders. Writing back to a friend in Washington he announced his arrival home “worn down with ill health, bad roads and heat of weather;” but he also spoke of the pleasure he was deriving from the company of his son’s two little children—little Rachel “as sprightly as a little fairy, and as wild as a little partridge,” to whom he had brought a doll from Washington; and the infant Andrew III whom he described as “a very large, fat boy” and later referred to as “a veritable Hercules.” One of his Washington friends wrote him during the summer expressing the hope that “in the cool and refreshing shades of your own lawns and the domestic quiet of your own hospitable mansion you will be enabled to forget, for a while at least I hope, the trouble and toil of your official station.” President Jackson doubtless did try to forget the cares of office while he was vacationing at home; but that he was not unmindful of the political possibilities of the overland journey homeward is shown in a letter he wrote back to Van Buren: “I found on my whole journey everything to cheer us; prosperity everywhere and all gratified and happy on the prospects of a circulating and stable metallic currency, and particularly the gold coin, which many had not for years seen a piece of before we presented them in payment of our bills.” And then he adds naively: “I had taken the precaution to lay in as many half eagles as paid our bills on our passage.”