Plainwell, MI
Taxi right up: the diner sits at the ramp edge, about a hundred feet from the tie-downs, family-owned, with aviation photos on the walls and a deck where kids fly paper airplanes while the real ones land. Breakfast is the point: the Kitchen Sink omelet, cinnamon roll French toast, homemade corned beef hash, and country fried steak are the review favorites. It is the kind of room where regulars wave strangers into their empty seats, and a grandpa flying his grandson home has been known to stop in for breakfast on the way. Open every day, 7 to 2 weekdays, 7 to 1 weekends; winters can be quiet, so a call ahead never hurts.
A small Michigan muni two miles north of downtown Plainwell, named for longtime local pilot Virgil L. Williams. Single asphalt runway (01/19) showing some age — extensive cracking on the surface, displaced thresholds marked with yellow cones. 100LL self-serve fuel by major credit card, 24 hours. Active local flying community organized as the Plainwell Pilots Association. Non-towered, CTAF 122.8. Small enough that the restaurant sees more cars than airplanes most days, but the regulars are split evenly.
On the field at KAZO. One of America's great aviation museums — over 100 aircraft including an SR-71B Blackbird trainer (one of only two SR-71s with dual cockpits), an F-117 Nighthawk, a P-40 Warhawk, an SBD Dauntless Helldiver in flying restoration. Multiple full-motion flight simulators and a paratrooper simulator make it especially good for kids. The Restoration Hangar lets visitors watch volunteers actively rebuilding aircraft — including ongoing work on a Curtis JN-4 Jenny. Two campuses connected by shuttle. Aviation pilgrimage destination.
KBIV puts you near Saugatuck, at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River on Lake Michigan's east shore. From the air the signature is the dunes: perched dunes, sand piled on bedrock by 10,000 years of wind off the lake, with Saugatuck Dunes State Park holding 1,120 acres and 2.5 miles of undeveloped shoreline. Mt. Baldhead is the big one, a 282-foot dune over the river channel; a 302-step staircase climbs the back, and the open lake-facing slope is a 30-second slide down loose sand. The Air Force ran a Cold War radar site on the summit; the building's gone but the foundations remain. The town has been an artists' colony since the 1880s, with the Ox-Bow School running since 1910, and it still has a hand-cranked chain ferry, the only one left working in the country.
De Zwaan ("The Swan") is the only authentic working Dutch windmill in the United States. It was built in 1761 in the village of Vinkel, North Brabant, the Netherlands, and operated as a grain mill there for two centuries. In 1964 the Dutch government allowed the city of Holland, Michigan to purchase it and ship it across the Atlantic — by special permit, since the Netherlands had passed an export ban on historic windmills after WWII. De Zwaan was reassembled in 1965 on a 36-acre municipal park called Windmill Island Gardens, on the Macatawa River north of downtown. The mill still grinds wheat into flour, ground on the original 1761 millstones; flour from De Zwaan is sold in the gift shop. The mill stands 125 feet tall with sails spanning 80 feet. A Dutch-trained miller operates it.
In the mid-1980s the West Michigan Horticultural Society in Grand Rapids was searching for land to build a botanical conservatory. They asked Frederik Meijer — the founder of the Meijer grocery chain, who had been buying property east of the city for one of his stores — to donate a parcel. Meijer had already bought a wooded tract along an East Beltline creek for a new supercenter. He looked at the land, decided to put his store elsewhere, and donated 70.7 acres for the garden in January 1991. He and his wife Lena then led a $13 million capital campaign, donated their personal sculpture collection, and opened the gardens to the public in April 1995. Thirty years later, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park has been named the best sculpture park in the United States by USA Today's 10Best readers three years running. The Art Newspaper ranks it among the 100 most-visited art museums in the world. The campus is now 158 acres. The 30-acre outdoor sculpture park, added in 2002, holds 300 sculptures from artists including Rodin, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Edgar Degas, Ai Weiwei, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Nina Akamu's 24-foot bronze "The American Horse" — completed from Leonardo da Vinci's original 1493 design that was never cast in his lifetime — is the campus icon and the photograph everyone takes. The 15,000-square-foot, five-story Lena Meijer Tropical Conservatory is Michigan's largest tropical conservatory. The annual butterfly exhibit (March-April) is the largest temporary butterfly exhibition in the nation — visitors walk among thousands of free-flying butterflies from around the world. The 8-acre Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Garden, designed by Hoichi Kurisu and opened June 10, 2015, integrates contemporary sculpture (including a 10-foot Anish Kapoor granite work) with traditional zen elements. The outdoor 1,900-seat amphitheater hosts a major concert series each summer. For a state most Americans don't associate with high art, this is an outlier. Grand Rapids has the country's best outdoor sculpture collection because Fred Meijer skipped one supercenter and gave the land away.