In just four days, the president will be leaving the White House after 8 years in office.
Throughout those years, the family ranch in Crawford has been a place of refuge and reinvigoration.
In fact, it's so special, daughter Jenna chose it as the site for her wedding.
Julie Hays, with our sister station News 10, recently sat down with President and Mrs. Bush.
And, as Julie found out, it's not so much the ranch itself, but rather its Central Texas location that make it so endearing.

JULIE
What did the ranch in Crawford mean to you during your time in the White House?

BUSH
It gave me a chance to go back to a state I love and the land is something that's special to me and Laura. And I was able to get outside and wander around and it was probably the freest I felt during my presidency. I'm very thankful to all the people who helped make our stay there good and my neighbors. Crawford has been special to us and will continue to be special to us.

JULIE
Anything you can tell us about the ranch that we can't see from the road..some things we don't know?

BUSH
Well, we have a fair amount of water frontage, we're on the middle fork of the Bosque and Rains Creek. There's good canyons in the there and fantastic rock formations. One of the interesting things taking place is Laura has grown a lot of blue stem grasses and we've restored a fair amount of the property to it's native habitat. I lease the land to a lot of people. I have strong relationships with the religious community in Elm Mott, Texas-- full of fantastic people, and they run the cows on there and to a tree farm run by a fellow out of Gatesville named John Taylor...and I drive about 16-thousand hard woods like Red Oaks and Live Oaks and Cedar Elms. It's just a nice piece of property and I'm lucky to live there.

JULIE
Why do you personally love the ranch?

MRS. BUSH
I like it because I like the way it looks. I love the way the Central Texas Prairie looks, and I love the way the wildflowers are and we have had some spectacular years of wildflowers, and it just so happened, we've had some of those world leaders on the really spectacular years of wildflowers, and they think of course that the ranch is always like that. We don't tell them we have a few dry years when we don't have that big of a show. I love the way it looks. George and I are restoring the prairie. We are replanting native prairie. We've so far planed and have a really good prairie for about 50 acres and now we are plowing and getting ready for another 30 acres, but we plow for a number of years to get rid of the invasive grasses and then of course, we are dependent on a year with a lot of rain so we can get seed off an intact prairie and get it established.

JULIE
What do you enjoy doing at the ranch that maybe viewers wouldn't expect you to be doing...maybe things you like to do outdoors?

MRS. BUSH
Well, I love to go for walks, people probably know that, but people may not know that the president has built some really great bike trails because he loves bicycling and they're up on the edge of the canyons that are in our property. So, you're walking along at the top of the canyon with the bluff, the limestone wall on side of you and then a drop off on the other side, not a steep drop off, but a drop off into the canyon, but it's a beautiful shaded walk. He rides his bike on it. I take my friends on walks on it and it's really a beautiful place to walk.