Crawfordsville, IN
Locally owned restaurant on the courthouse square, in a downtown building that carried the same name for a century as a grocery, feed, and hardware store; the restaurant kept it when it opened in 2018. Steaks and burgers done seriously, with cheese curds and truffle fries as the openers regulars order, and a full bar. Lunch from 11am; closed Mondays; the courthouse lot across the street opens up after 4:30pm. Crawfordsville called itself the 'Athens of Indiana' in the 19th century for its concentration of writers; Lew Wallace wrote Ben-Hur here, and the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum a few blocks east is worth pairing with lunch.
Crawfordsville opened its city field in June 1945, in the last summer of the war, and still owns it today; the red-roofed terminal and 5,500-foot runway host more than sixty operations a day. The field keeps an increasingly rare piece of the old system alive: its own NDB, the CFJ beacon on 388 kHz, sitting right on the airport. Magnetic drift caught up with the runway numbers in 2024, when 4/22 was repainted as 5/23.
The 1898 octagonal study where Civil War general and Mexican Ambassador Lew Wallace wrote much of Ben-Hur — at the time the best-selling American novel ever, eventually adapted into multiple films including the 1959 Charlton Heston classic that won 11 Oscars. The study is a National Historic Landmark with Wallace's original desk, books, and sword collection. Wallace was a fascinating polymath: lawyer, general at Shiloh, governor of New Mexico Territory (he negotiated with Billy the Kid), ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and author. The ornate Italianate study reflects his global eye. Adjacent to Wabash College campus.
Deep sandstone gorges carved by Sugar Creek over millions of years. The old-growth forest here was never logged — some trees are 300+ years old. From 2000ft, the gorge system appears as dark shadows cutting through solid canopy. Sugar Creek itself makes dramatic S-curves visible from above. The suspension bridge is hard to spot but look for the clearing at the nature center.
31 historic covered bridges — more than any county in the US. The Bridgeton Bridge (1868) and Mansfield Bridge are the most photogenic from the air. At 2000ft AGL in mid-October, the hardwood canopy surrounding each bridge turns orange and crimson. The annual Covered Bridge Festival draws 1 million visitors. The bridge cluster is concentrated between Turkey Run and Raccoon Lake along Sugar Creek and Big Raccoon Creek.
The Wabash River — celebrated in Indiana's state song "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away" — winds 503 miles across the state, defining Indiana's landscape and history. The river forms much of the Indiana-Illinois border. Best aerial views: the great bend at Lafayette/West Lafayette where the river curves around Purdue, the high cliffs near Logansport, and the wide farmland stretches around Terre Haute. Fall color along the corridor in mid-October is exceptional.