Abilene, TX
Tom Perini's ranch steakhouse in Buffalo Gap is legendary — mesquite-grilled steaks in a working ranch setting. Worth the drive. Texas Monthly has called it one of the best steakhouses in Texas. Open Fridays and Saturdays only.
Abilene was home to three military bases during WWII — Camp Barkeley, Abilene Army Air Base, and Tye Army Air Field — making it one of the most militarized cities in Texas. Dyess Air Force Base, home of the 7th Bomb Wing flying B-1B Lancers, still operates today. The city was founded as a cattle shipping point on the Texas & Pacific Railway and named for Abilene, Kansas. The surrounding mesquite country is quintessential West Texas.
During WWII, Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas was the only all-female military air base in American history. The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) trained here from 1943 to 1944, flying every type of military aircraft to free male pilots for combat. These women ferried bombers, towed targets for live gunnery practice, and tested repaired aircraft — 38 were killed in service. Despite flying over 60 million miles, the WASP weren't granted military status until 1977 and didn't receive the Congressional Gold Medal until 2010. The National WASP WWII Museum in Hangar 1 at Avenger Field preserves their legacy. The airport (KSWW) is still active.
A massive pink granite dome rising 425 feet above the Texas Hill Country. The exposed batholith covers 640 acres and is over 1 billion years old — one of the oldest exposed rock surfaces in North America. Native Americans believed the rock was enchanted because it groans and creaks at night (thermal expansion). The dome is unmistakable from the air — a bare pink hemisphere surrounded by green oak woodland. Nearby Fredericksburg was founded by German settlers in 1846.
On the grounds of KLBB sits a museum dedicated to one of the most overlooked combat roles of World War II: the American glider pilots who trained at South Plains Army Airfield (now KLBB) from 1942 to 1945 and flew engineless Waco CG-4A gliders into Sicily, Normandy, Operation Market Garden, the Rhine crossing, Burma, and the Philippines. The museum holds a fully restored CG-4A — 48 feet long, 83-foot wingspan, wood and fabric — and tells the story of how 6,000 men were trained at Lubbock to fly an aircraft with no engine on a single one-way combat mission. The Silent Wings Memorial wall lists every glider pilot killed in action. Easy walk from the FBO ramp.
In 1978, two Waco teenagers hiking along a creek bed off the Bosque River pulled a bone out of an eroding bank and assumed it was from a cow. The bone was 3 feet long. They took it to Baylor's Strecker Museum, where it was identified as the femur of a Columbian mammoth — Mammuthus columbi, the largest mammoth species ever to roam North America, weighing up to 10 tons. What lay underground turned out to be the only known nursery herd of Pleistocene mammoths in the United States: adult females and juveniles found together as they died, possibly in successive flooding events about 65,000 years ago. The site has yielded 24 mammoths plus a Western camel, a saber-tooth tooth, giant tortoise, and alligator remains. Excavation ran in two phases (1978-1990 and 1990-1997). The 107-acre site opened to the public in December 2009 and was designated a National Monument by President Obama on July 10, 2015 — managed jointly by the National Park Service, the City of Waco, and Baylor University. Visitors walk a paved 300-yard path from the welcome center to the Dig Shelter, where fossils remain in their original positions in the bank.