Greensburg, IN
A seasonal ice cream stand with a mini-golf course at the edge of Decatur County Park, about 150 yards northeast of the fuel pumps; an easy walk from transient parking. Soft serve, shakes, sundaes, and burgers. Open afternoons through the summer season, roughly late May into early fall. A genuine fly-in favorite; pilots have made the trip just for a cone.
Decatur County's GA airport. Greensburg is famous for the tree growing out of the courthouse tower — a "no, really" Indiana oddity. Honda Manufacturing of Indiana operates a major auto plant nearby.
Before radio navigation, pilots flew the mail down chains of lighted beacons: 50-foot steel towers with rotating lights, each marking a 70-foot concrete arrow on the ground pointing the way to the next station. The lighted airway through central Indiana was the Cincinnati-Chicago route by way of Indianapolis, and Embry-Riddle flew the CAM-24 mail over it starting in the late 1920s. Most of the system is gone, but a preserved arrow survives at Shelbyville Municipal, which began life as the airway's intermediate landing field No. 8; a few more arrows hide in the fields of Shelby and Rush counties east of town. The arrows were poured between 1926 and 1932, then radio made them relics inside a decade.
Columbus, Indiana — population about 50,000 — ranks sixth on the American Institute of Architects'' list of US cities for architectural innovation and design, behind only Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston, and San Francisco. How a small diesel-engine manufacturing town in southern Indiana came to hold more than 90 significant modernist buildings, six of them National Historic Landmarks, is a story about one man and one idea. J. Irwin Miller ran Cummins, the engine maker headquartered in Columbus. In 1954 he created a foundation program with an unusual offer: if the local school board or another public body hired an architect from a foundation-curated list of the best designers in the world, the Cummins Foundation would pay the design fee. The town said yes, again and again, for fifty years. Columbus filled with work by Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, Cesar Pelli, and Kevin Roche. The landmarks: First Christian Church (Eliel Saarinen, 1942) was one of the first contemporary churches in America. North Christian Church (Eero Saarinen, 1964, his final work) is a hexagonal building with a 192-foot spire rising from a single central oculus. The Miller House (Eero Saarinen, 1957) — Miller''s own residence, with interiors by Alexander Girard and landscape by Dan Kiley — is one of the most important modernist houses in the country, now owned by Newfields and open for tours. The Irwin Conference Center (formerly Irwin Union Bank, Eero Saarinen, 1954) floated a glass-walled bank on slender columns downtown. Add the Bartholomew County Library (I.M. Pei, 1969) with Henry Moore''s "Large Arch" bronze out front, and dozens more.
Horseshoe Indianapolis (Indiana Downs when it opened in 2002, Indiana Grand from 2013, rebranded under Caesars in 2022) runs the only live Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse racing in Indiana, April into November, on a one-mile dirt track with a seven-eighths-mile turf course inside it. The Indiana Derby, the track's signature Grade III race, runs each July. The whole complex sits about a mile west of KGEZ.
Indiana's longest historic operating railroad — 16 miles of track between Connersville and the historic canal town of Metamora. Steam and diesel excursions run weekends April through November along the Whitewater River valley. The railroad uses original 1880s right-of-way of the Whitewater Canal Railroad. Metamora at the western end is a preserved 1840s canal town with the only working aqueduct (Duck Creek Aqueduct, 1846) in the United States — a wooden bridge that carries the Whitewater Canal over a creek. Pair a fly-in to KCEV with a train ride to Metamora — best 1840s time-travel experience in Indiana.