Huntington, WV
Bar and grill on the grass strip at Robert Newlon Airpark, where the campground runs down to the Ohio River. Cooked-to-order seafood is the identity; crab cakes and fried oysters draw the praise. Full bar, fire pits on the patio, and skydivers and pattern traffic to watch through dinner. Hosts the Fly In Festival every July; three days of live music on the field. Thursday and Friday 5 to 9 pm, Saturday noon to 9, Sunday noon to 8; closed Monday through Wednesday.
A 2,270-foot grass strip on the bank of the Ohio River, six miles northeast of Huntington in the Lesage community. Opened February 1972 by Robert Newlon. Owner Carl Bailey runs the field today and grew an RV park, a restaurant, a pavilion, and a pickleball court around it. Active skydiving operation (WV Skydivers), biplane rides by appointment, the 11th annual Fly In Festival on the calendar for July 2026. Privately owned, no fuel on field — call ahead for permission to use the grass. The kind of low-key Ohio River backcountry strip that turns a visit into a destination weekend.
Ashland anchors the south end of US-23, the stretch Kentucky named the Country Music Highway because no road on Earth has produced more million-selling country stars per mile — Loretta Lynn, the Judds, Billy Ray Cyrus, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Tom T. Hall, all from these counties. Ashland itself is the hometown of the Judds and Billy Ray Cyrus, and its 1931 Paramount Arts Center — a jewel-box movie palace — is where the "Achy Breaky Heart" video was filmed in 1992. The town sits in the corner where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet on the Ohio River.
Where the Scioto meets the Ohio, Portsmouth turned its flood defenses into art. Along roughly 2,000 feet of concrete floodwall, muralist Robert Dafford painted some fifty panels — 2,000 years of Ohio Valley history, from the Hopewell mound builders and the Shawnee through the steamboat era — one of the largest single-artist mural projects anywhere. (Dafford is the same hand behind the floodwall murals down the river at Maysville and Paducah, Kentucky.) Behind the town rise the ridges of Shawnee State Forest, the "Little Smokies of Ohio" and one of the state's largest forests. Greater Portsmouth's airport sits up in Minford, northeast of the river.
You're at Ohio University's own field, Snyder Field, in the hills of Athens. OU is the oldest university in the Northwest Territory, chartered in 1804 — its lineage runs back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its promise that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The College Green at the campus's heart, with Manasseh Cutler Hall facing true north, is a National Historic Landmark. Across the valley stand the Ridges — the former Athens Lunatic Asylum, a sprawling Kirkbride-plan hospital now owned by the university and home to an art museum. Athens is deep Appalachian-foothill country, eighty miles southeast of Columbus.
Pike County is mountain country, and two things here are worth the trip. The Pikeville Cut-Through, carved between 1973 and 1987, sliced a notch clean through a mountain to reroute a river, a railroad, and a highway all at once — about 18 million cubic yards moved, the largest earth-moving project in the Western Hemisphere after the Panama Canal, and locals call it the Eighth Wonder of the World. This is also the heart of Hatfield-McCoy country: the feud between the McCoys of Kentucky's Pike County and the Hatfields across the Tug Fork in West Virginia ran from 1863 to 1891. From the air the Cut-Through is a startling man-made gash in the ridgeline with road, rail, and water stacked through it.