Batavia, OH
A GA pilgrimage. Every Saturday from April through October, noon to 2pm, the Sporty's crew grills free hot dogs, metts, and brats on the ramp in appreciation of customers; more than a quarter million hot dogs served by their own count, at what they bill as the ultimate '$100 hamburger' destination. Sporty's Pilot Shop is why the field matters: Hal Shevers started it in 1961 selling from the trunk of his car at Lunken, and it grew into the pilot-supply institution, with the shop, flight school, and Sporty's own FBO on the ramp; they will happily sign your logbook. The Tri-State Warbird Museum is on the field. Even outside cookout season, the flight is worth it.
Just east of Cincinnati, I69 sits in the rolling hills above the Ohio River. Clermont County is home to the Grant Birthplace State Memorial — the small white cottage where Ulysses S. Grant was born in 1822. The Sloan Mansion (1865) is another historic gem. From the field, downtown Cincinnati is 25 minutes by car.
This is a pilgrimage field. Clermont County Airport is better known as Sporty's — it's where Hal Shevers built Sporty's Pilot Shop, which started in 1961 with handheld radios sold from the trunk of his car and grew into the world's largest pilot shop and one of general aviation's great institutions. (Shevers learned to fly in the Purdue Flying Club — the same Purdue whose airport anchors a pin up in Indiana.) The field is home to Sporty's headquarters, Sporty's Academy — the Part 141 school that runs the University of Cincinnati's professional pilot program — and the famous Saturday-morning fly-in cookout. East of Cincinnati, it's exactly the kind of place a cross-country ought to detour for.
One of America's most beautiful river cities. The Ohio River makes a dramatic bend around downtown Cincinnati, with the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge (1866) — Roebling's prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge — connecting Cincinnati to Covington, KY. The downtown skyline includes the iconic Carew Tower (1930) and the modern Great American Tower. Smale Riverfront Park along the water has been beautifully developed. Approach to KLUK takes you up the river valley with the city rising on the bluffs.
Hamilton calls itself the City of Sculpture, and Pyramid Hill is why. On 470 acres of rolling hills above the Great Miami River, philanthropist Harry Wilks gathered more than seventy monumental outdoor sculptures — granite forms twelve to eighteen feet tall, welded-steel towers, one work compared to Stonehenge — and donated the land as a nonprofit park in 1997. It's one of the largest sculpture parks in the country. The Pyramid House on the grounds holds ancient Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Egyptian antiquities dating back to 1550 BCE. Butler County's airport is just east, between here and the Cincinnati-Dayton corridor.
Tucked into the hills southwest of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport is the place American paleontology was born. Big Bone Lick is a cluster of salt springs and marshy ground that trapped Ice Age mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths, then preserved their bones — found here as early as 1739. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both studied specimens from this spot, and in 1807 William Clark, fresh off the Lewis & Clark expedition, ran the first organized vertebrate fossil dig in the country here. A live bison herd grazes the grounds today, a nod to the megafauna that came before. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2024.