Amarillo, TX
Home of the free 72-ounce steak challenge — eat it in an hour and it's free. Kitschy and touristy but an absolute Texas experience. The real reason to fly to Amarillo is Palo Duro Canyon, 25 miles south.
Named for astronaut Rick Husband, commander of Space Shuttle Columbia, who was from Amarillo and died when Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on February 1, 2003. The airport was originally Amarillo Army Air Field, a WWII training base. Amarillo sits on the Llano Estacado at 3,607ft MSL. The Panhandle's extreme flatness — interrupted dramatically by Palo Duro Canyon 25 miles south — is one of the most striking landscape contrasts in Texas from the air.
In 1974, San Francisco art collective Ant Farm proposed to Amarillo millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 a tribute to "the evolution of the Cadillac tailfin." Marsh agreed. They acquired ten used Cadillacs spanning model years 1949 to 1963 and buried them nose-down in one of Marsh's wheat fields, inclined at the angle of the Great Pyramid of Giza, evenly spaced and pointing east-to-west. Total cost: $3,250. Charles Kuralt put it on national television a year later. In 1997 the entire installation was exhumed and replanted two miles west along the I-40 frontage road, ahead of Amarillo's encroaching city limits — even the original site's litter was carried over for authenticity. Graffiti is encouraged; spray paint is sold on-site. Fifty years later, the cars wear a foot-thick rind of layered paint.
Palo Duro Canyon is 120 miles long, 20 miles wide, and 800 feet deep — the second-largest canyon in the United States after the Grand Canyon. From the air, the Texas Panhandle's almost supernatural flatness is interrupted without warning by this massive gash in the earth. The color palette is stunning: red, orange, and yellow layers of Permian-age rock against the endless tan of the Llano Estacado above. The 'Lighthouse' rock formation — a distinctive hoodoo — is visible from altitude. The canyon was the site of the decisive 1874 Red River War battle where Colonel Ranald Mackenzie destroyed a Comanche horse herd, ending the Southern Plains Indian Wars.
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, a Liberal, Kansas insurance agent named Max Zimmerman attended a convention in another state, mentioned he was from Kansas, and a waiter said, "Oh, that's where Dorothy's from." Zimmerman realized: L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" never specified a Kansas hometown — and no town had claimed it. He set about claiming it for Liberal. A local family donated a 1907 farmhouse much like the one described in the book; the city moved it to the grounds of the Seward County Coronado Museum in 1981, restored it to match the 1939 film, and Governor John Carlin officially recognized Liberal as Dorothy Gale's hometown. The museum's prize artifact is the actual scale model used in the 1939 MGM film for the tornado-scene house — recovered from the studio archive and now displayed in a glass case. A connected 5,000-square-foot animated "Land of Oz" walks visitors through the movie's scenes — Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, the Emerald City — and the on-site Coronado Museum tells the actual story of Seward County, from Coronado's 1541 expedition through the Dust Bowl and on to Liberal's annual International Pancake Day race (run since 1950 against Olney, England).