President Barack Obama made his first weekend visit to Camp David, and Monday gave a thumbs up to the retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.
"It was beautiful," he said Monday. "The girls just had a great time. They had a lot of fun. You can see that during the summer it's going to be a nice place to spend a lot of time. Hit a few golf balls. Played a little basketball."
The Obamas made it a group outing to the camp.
"Sasha brought one of her friends and then a friend of Michelle's and ours came up with her two kids," Obama said aboard Air Force One as he flew to Indiana for a town hall meeting pitching his economic stimulus proposal.
First Lady Michelle Obama gave it great marks as well during a visit Monday to the Interior Department.
"Some of the greatest adventures that we experience in life here in this nation, like family vacations, and camping, and hiking, and fishing, if you're blessed to have access to those resources, are possible because of the work that you do right here in this department," she said.
"And Barack and I and the girls, as you may have read, just had a little retreat away. We visited Camp David for the first time, and got to experience the beautiful, the beauty of those grounds, and it was just wonderful to get a bit of a break and to spend some quality time as a family in nature."
The secluded, and heavily guarded, retreat features several cabins on heavily wooded grounds. A key attraction for First Families is the ability to walk around outdoors out of sight of the press or public.
It was named Shangri-la when Franklin D. Roosevelt first used it to escape Washington, then renamed by Dwight Eisenhower for his grandson. George H.W. Bush thought so much of it that he included a replica of his Camp David office at his presidential museum in College Station, Texas.