Bluffton, IN
Wells County GA strip on the Wabash River. Bluffton is famous for its annual Free Street Fair — one of the longest continuously running street fairs in America (since 1898).
The only museum in the world dedicated to the office of Vice President of the United States. Located in former VP Dan Quayle's hometown of Huntington, IN, the museum covers all 49 (and counting) Vice Presidents — from John Adams to the present. Quirky, unexpected, and surprisingly thorough — most visitors leave knowing more about the second-most-important office than they ever expected. A worthwhile detour for political and history fans.
The St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers join to form the Maumee River right in downtown Fort Wayne — a striking three-rivers confluence visible on approach to either KSMD or KFWA. The historic Old Fort site (a reconstructed 1815 fort) marks Fort Wayne's namesake. Promenade Park along the river has reinvented the downtown waterfront. Fort Wayne — Indiana's second-largest city — has the most extensive park system per capita of any major Midwest city, much of it along the rivers and visible from above.
James Dean was born in Marion in 1931 and raised on his aunt and uncle's farm outside Fairmount, the town that buried him at Park Cemetery in 1955 and never stopped remembering. The James Dean Museum downtown, grown out of the Fairmount Historical Museum, holds the largest collection of his belongings anywhere, on loan from the Winslow family: two of his motorcycles, movie props, and a replica of his childhood bedroom with the actual furniture. The last full weekend of every September the festival swells this town of about 2,500 to something like 40,000, with a car show, a parade, and the look-alike contest. Fairmount's other export is Garfield; creator Jim Davis grew up on a nearby farm with a lot of barn cats.
One of America's rarest surviving early-20th-century airport hangars. Built in 1930 with massive Truscon Steel Company doors — the only example of their kind in the country at the time. During WWII, the hangar produced TDR-1 Assault Drones, an early version of the cruise missile. Famous visitors over the decades included Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Wiley Post. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The future home of the National Airmail Museum, which signed an MOU in 2024 to lease and restore the hangar — they need to raise $5M+ to complete the project. Tour the field by ground after landing — the Carousel Hangar is the only example of Clark W. Smith's patented rotating-door design ever built.