Jenna Bush Hager Jokes About Running into Ex-Boyfriends in Austin: 'Sounds Like I Have a Lot of Exes in Texas'

Jenna Bush Hager is returning home — but it doesn’t come without some blasts from the past.

Bush Hager, 42, and her Today show co-host Hoda Kotb went to Austin, Texas this week, sharing on the Oct. 24 episode that they have been retracing the steps of the former first daughter’s childhood. Kotb, 60, even joked that everywhere they went, they ran into one of Bush Hager’s ex-boyfriends.

“Being with Jenna in Austin is incredible,” Kotb said of Bush Hager, who has been married to Henry Chase Hager since 2008. “First of all, it feels like a tiny town even though it’s the 11th biggest city… But to turn any corner and see Jenna’s 7th-grade date, her prom date showed up at Don’s the other night.”

“It sounds like I still have a lot of exes that live in Texas, and I might,” Bush Hager laughed. “Austin was my home from middle school through college. I could not leave, I had to go to UT.”

“My mom even said the other day, she goes, ‘Why did you apply to all those schools you were always going to Texas?” she added. “I have lived out of Texas longer than I've lived in it, it’s still in every bone in my body, I love it so much.”

The pair even met up with all of Bush Hager’s friends, who were there to watch the show.

“I think what’s so cool about Jenna is her besties are here, and also they show up,” Kotb gushed before a photo of the group popped up on the screen. “This was us at the bar the other night, all these high school friends showed up.”

Kotb also revealed they took a trip back to Austin High, where Bush Hager attended high school from 1996 until 2000 while her father was Governor of Texas.

“Jenna was crying – it was the most beautiful thing to be home,” Kotb said.

“If you watch the show, I know you’re shocked I was crying,” Bush Hager quipped. “But if any of you have not gone back to your high school, go back, because there was something about entering this gym where we spent all of our Friday pep rallies for Texas football, which is such a thing. To be back there in a place that shaped me so much was so weirdly emotional, I couldn’t stand it.”

Kotb added that they also visited her co-host's old teachers, and Bush Hager, while shouting them out, joked, “I apologize for my behavior.”

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Bush Hager moved to Texas in 1994 when her dad George W. Bush was elected as Governor. The year she graduated, Bush won the election for President of the United States, and while he moved to Washington D.C., she stayed in Austin to get her degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin. 

While she worked for a few years in D.C. and Maryland as a teacher, Bush Hager later moved on to become an author and later, a television host, when she replaced Kathy Lee Gifford as the co-host of Today in 2019.

"It feels organic and it feels right, which I don't know if I would do it if it didn't," she told PEOPLE at the time. "They probably wouldn't have asked me to do it if it didn't. But it just feels like the right time for me."