Bedford, IN
Tucked in an industrial stretch of 8th Street that regulars insist you would never find by accident, and worth the hunt. Everything is homemade and the board changes daily; a recent week ran six kinds of French toast, four quiches, coffee cake, and chicken pot pie, with gluten-free bread available and ingredients from local farms. Pick your own coffee mug from the shelf when you walk in, and try for a table topped with old maps or recipes. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 7 am to 2 pm; closed Sunday and Monday, so this is the weekday-and-Saturday breakfast stop.
Downtown on 15th Street since 2022, a family-friendly pub that runs nicer than the name suggests: hand-pressed burgers with house-made sauces, an award-billed smoked rib platter with jalapeno cheddar cornbread, fried bologna on Texas toast for the traditionalists, and the Sidewinder loaded fries reviewers rave about. A breaded tenderloin that fits the bun is its own kind of Indiana statement. Craft taps, cocktails, back patio. Open seven days, 11 to 9, until 10 on Friday and Saturday, Sundays 11 to 3; it covers the Sunday lunch that Apron Strings leaves open.
This is the field where a railroad signalman's kid from Mitchell learned what flying felt like: a local attorney with a small plane took teenage Gus Grissom up from Bedford's airport and taught him the basics. Grissom flew a hundred combat missions in Korea, joined the Mercury Seven, and in 1965 the city renamed its 1942-vintage field for him, unveiling a three-ton block of the local limestone with his name on it. Airports were for dead aviators, his fellow astronauts teased; Grissom answered that this time they'd named one for a live one.
The Salem and St. Genevieve limestone quarried around Bedford built the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, the Lincoln Memorial, and 35 of the 50 state capitols. From the air, the massive open-pit quarries are a dramatic landscape — turquoise rectangles cut deep into the earth. The Indiana Limestone Heritage Festival each June celebrates the industry and stonecarving tradition. Just south, the town of Mitchell preserves Gus Grissom's boyhood home — the Mercury 7 astronaut, second American in space, who died in the Apollo 1 fire. The Gus Grissom Memorial includes his Gemini 3 capsule "Molly Brown."
The limestone quarried around Bedford and Bloomington built a startling share of monumental America — the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, and some 35 state capitols. The Empire Quarry is the most famous: the pit that yielded 18,630 tons of stone for the Empire State Building. The belt between the two towns is pocked with these workings, active and abandoned, their sheer pale walls dropping to floors of still blue water.
Indiana's only national forest — 200,000 acres of hardwood hills covering southern Indiana. Hemlock Cliffs, Wesley Chapel Gulf, the Knobstone Trail (Indiana's longest), and the iconic French Lick / West Baden region all sit within or near the forest. The hills are a glacial-era surprise in flat Indiana — the Wisconsin glacier stopped just north of here, leaving the south side rugged and forested. Spectacular fall color October 15-30, peaking earlier than the rest of the state.
You are landing at Virgil I. Grissom Municipal Airport. Seven miles south, inside Spring Mill State Park, the Gus Grissom Memorial holds "Molly Brown" — the Gemini 3 spacecraft Grissom flew in March 1965 on the first crewed Gemini mission. The airport carries his name; the park holds his spacecraft; he grew up twelve miles away in Mitchell, Indiana. Few general-aviation fields in the country bind their name, their region, and a national hero together this tightly. Virgil "Gus" Grissom was the second American in space (Mercury-Redstone 4, July 1961 — the "Liberty Bell 7" suborbital flight whose hatch blew open prematurely on splashdown and sank the capsule), the first American to fly in space twice (Gemini 3), and the commander of Apollo 1. He died with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the January 27, 1967 cabin fire during a launch-pad test. He was 40. The memorial at Spring Mill tells his story through the Molly Brown capsule, his spacesuit, and personal artifacts. Spring Mill State Park is one of Indiana''s oldest and finest. Its centerpiece is Pioneer Village — a restored early-1800s limestone milling settlement built around a three-story gristmill still turned by water carried on a long wooden flume from a cave spring. The mill grinds corn for visitors. The surrounding karst holds Twin Caves (boat tours run into the cave on an underground stream), Donaldson Cave, and Bronson Cave, all cut into the Mitchell Plateau limestone that built southern Indiana — the same Salem limestone quarried up around Bedford. Donaldson Woods is a 67-acre old-growth forest that was never logged.