Lima, OH
Serving Lima since 1928, when Stub Wilson built the first one downtown on North Elizabeth Street. The chain began in Flint in 1923, ran to some 400 stores before the war, and five survive today; three of them are in Lima. Dave Thomas grew up eating at the Kalamazoo Kewpee and said the chain inspired him to go into the business, which is why Wendy's patties are square. Fresh-ground beef, square patties, frosted malts; order a double with cheese under the house jingle, hamburg pickle on top, makes your heart go flippity-flop. The drive-thru once spun cars back out of the tight lot on a turntable. Opens 5:30 am, so it works for breakfast; closed Sundays.
Lima (LIE-mah) is a former tank manufacturing center — the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center here built M1 Abrams tanks for decades. Lima Memorial Health, Procter & Gamble, and Husky Refining anchor the modern economy. The airport sees significant corporate traffic. The Allen County Museum has Ohio's largest collection of locomotive memorabilia.
A striking dome-shaped museum in Neil Armstrong's hometown of Wapakoneta, OH. Houses Armstrong's Gemini 8 spacecraft, his pre-flight Apollo 11 training suit, an actual Moon rock, and an F5D Skylancer Armstrong flew as a NASA test pilot. Operated by the Ohio History Connection. The Summer Moon Festival each July (around the Apollo 11 anniversary, July 20) brings the town alive with concerts and reenactments. Smaller than the Air Force Museum but more focused — and Armstrong is buried at sea, so this is the closest thing to a memorial.
The largest inland lake in Ohio (13,500 acres) — built in the 1840s as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, briefly the world's largest man-made lake. Today the lake is a recreation hub for west-central Ohio. The surrounding Mercer County is heavily German Catholic, and the "Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches" — over a dozen 19th-century churches with prominent crosses, visible for miles across the flat farmland. Maria Stein, Saint Henry, Cassella, and Minster all have stunning historic churches.
This quiet Union County field sits in the middle of an unlikely automotive capital. In 1982 Honda built the first Japanese-owned car plant on American soil here at Marysville — the first US-made Accord, "USA 001," rolled off the line on November 1 that year — and the complex has since grown into Ohio's largest employer. Northwest of the plant, near East Liberty, lies the Transportation Research Center: a 4,500-acre proving ground born from Ohio State engineering research in the early 1970s, anchored by a 7.5-mile high-speed test oval that is a genuine landmark from the air — a vast banked ring scribed into the farmland.
One of America's most active warbird restoration shops, located at Grimes Field in Urbana, OH. The signature project is the B-17 Flying Fortress "Champaign Lady" — a years-long restoration to flying status. Visitors can watch the work in progress in the open hangar. The museum also has a B-25 Mitchell, several T-6 Texans, and other aircraft. Open weekly with active volunteer mechanics happy to talk shop. A must-visit for warbird fans.