Brenham, TX
Built by the City of Brenham in 1964 — single runway nestled in trees off a back road five miles north of downtown. The reason pilots fly here is the Southern Flyer Diner: Jack and Janet Hess opened it on the field in October 2002, '50s-style with checkerboard floor, jukebox, and a deck overlooking the runway. Within a few years it was the #1 $100 hamburger destination in the country (2008) and has been a perennial top-10 finisher every year since. Brenham is also home to Blue Bell Ice Cream — the creamery has been here since 1907 and runs tours 15 minutes from the ramp. A.J. Foyt keeps a couple of his planes on the field.
Brazos Bend is a 4,897-acre park on a slow bend of the Brazos River about 45 minutes southwest of Houston, near KSGR; from the air it's a big block of cypress bayou and bottomland in otherwise developed country. Somewhere between 250 and 350 adult alligators live in its waterways, which is why the rule is thirty feet of distance and no swimming. The odd tenant is the George Observatory, a Houston Museum of Natural Science outpost on a rise in the park, with three domed telescopes including a 36-inch that's open to the public on Saturday nights. It works because the park keeps the sky dark this close to a major city.
The Texas State Capitol stands 302.64 feet tall — 14.64 feet taller than the US Capitol in Washington, which it was modeled after. Built 1882-1888 of "sunset red" granite from Marble Falls, it remains the largest state capitol in America by floor space and one of the tallest. The state paid for it with three million acres of the Panhandle — land the contractors used to launch what became the XIT Ranch, the largest cattle ranch in the world at the time. The original design called for local Hill Country limestone, but the stone proved iron-heavy and rust-streaked. The owners of Granite Mountain near Marble Falls offered to donate enough pink granite if the state would build them a railroad to ship it. The state did. Scottish stonecutters were hired and 188,518 cubic feet of granite was hauled 60 miles. Some blocks fell off the flatcars at sharp curves and still sit in fields along the right-of-way. The dome's visibility from downtown is protected by 30 "Capitol View Corridors" — sight-line easements established in 1983 that cap building heights for distances up to five miles to keep the Goddess of Liberty visible.
The San Jacinto Monument is the tallest stone column memorial in the world at 567 feet — 15 feet taller than the Washington Monument. It marks the site where Sam Houston's Texian Army defeated Santa Anna on April 21, 1836, winning Texas independence from Mexico in a battle lasting just 18 minutes. The Battleship Texas (BB-35), the last surviving dreadnought battleship, is moored nearby. From the air, the monument's distinctive star-topped column is visible from miles across the flat Houston Ship Channel industrial landscape — a monument to revolution surrounded by refineries.
The Lone Star Flight Museum sits at the western edge of Ellington Field, on the site of one of America's last surviving WWI air training bases. The collection began in 1985 as a private holding of restored warbirds by Houston funeral magnate Robert Waltrip; it opened to the public at Galveston's Scholes Field in 1990. In September 2017 the museum moved into a new $38 million, 130,000 sq ft facility next to Ellington — closer to its airshow audiences and on an active military/commercial/NASA flightline. The flying collection includes a B-17 Flying Fortress, B-25 Mitchell, DC-3, P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair, SBD Dauntless, TBM Avenger, T-6 Texan, and Stearman trainer — all still airworthy. Rides are sold in the B-17, B-25, and T-6. The Texas Aviation Hall of Fame, established by the Texas Legislature in 1995, lives in the building. Its 100+ inductees include Bessie Coleman, Wiley Post, Howard Hughes, Eisenhower, both Bush presidents, the Tuskegee Airmen, the WASPs, the Doolittle Raiders, and astronauts Eileen Collins, Joe Engle, and Gene Cernan.