Barack Obama is about to finish his second term in the White House. What will he do once he's returned to a quasi-normal life?
In a video screened at this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, Obama joked about a number of potential options: Getting a driver's license, playing golf every day, wearing comfortable mom jeans.
But maybe he'll also follow in the footsteps of some of his predecessors. Here's a look at some of the interesting paths that 12 other presidents took after retiring from the nation's highest office.
George Washington started a distillery.
After serving as the fledgling country's first-ever President, Washington moved on to a totally new endeavor: making whiskey.
His distillery was just 75 feet by 30 feet in size, but in 1799 — the year of Washington's death — it produced 11,000 gallons of booze. That production volume made it the largest distillery in America at the time, according to George Washington's Mount Vernon.
John Quincy Adams became a political junkie.
One term as Commander in Chief wasn't enough time in Washington for our sixth president: After losing his reelection bid in 1828, Adams went on to serve nine terms in Congress, as a Representative for Massachusetts.
He worked right up until the end, too: Adams had a stroke and collapsed right on the House floor in 1848. Two days later, at age 80, he died.
Franklin Pierce hung out with Nathaniel Hawthorne in Rome.
Franklin Pierce and novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne developed a lifelong friendship after they both enrolled at Maine's Bowdoin College in 1820. When Pierce was a senator, he appointed Hawthorne to a job at the Boston Customs House so his financially troubled friend could keep writing.
And when Pierce retired from the presidency in 1857, he left on a grandiose vacation to Madeira, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Rome, where he met up with his longtime buddy. At the time, Hawthorne's daughter was ill, and the novelist took great comfort in the visit.
"[Pierce] has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and strong that he really did us good,"Hawthorne later wrote of their time in Italy.
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