Chattanooga, TN
Champy's started in Chattanooga in 2009, when Seth and Crissy Champion opened the first location on a family recipe forty years old and a love of the Mississippi Delta; eight locations across two states later, this one on ML King Boulevard is the flagship. Chicken is fried to order, the hand-rolled Delta hot tamales are the sleeper signature, crawfish shows up in season, and the beer program is built around 40-ounce bottles; the house shorthand is Forty's and Fowl. The restaurant bills its chicken as the local Best of the Best winner eight years running, and Garden & Gun has tipped its hat. Open seven days, 10:30 am to 10 pm, midnight on Friday and Saturday, so lunch and late dinner both work. Lookout Mountain is visible on the approach.
Lookout Mountain, visible on the approach, was the site of the 'Battle Above the Clouds' during the Civil War (November 1863). The mountain's sheer cliff face and the Tennessee River bend below make for a stunning visual.
On November 24, 1863, Union forces attacked Confederate positions on Lookout Mountain in what became known as the 'Battle Above the Clouds' — fog and mist shrouded the mountain during the fight. The cliff face rises 1,400 feet above the Tennessee River, creating one of the most dramatic geological features in the eastern US. Point Park on the summit and the Incline Railway are visible from the air. The Tennessee River makes a dramatic horseshoe bend around Moccasin Bend at the base.
The oldest registered distillery in the United States — federally registered in 1866 — sits in a hollow at Lynchburg, where a limestone cave spring runs a constant 56 degrees and feeds every drop of the whiskey. Jack Daniel's is defined by the Lincoln County Process: before aging, the new spirit is slowly filtered through ten feet of sugar-maple charcoal, which is what separates Tennessee whiskey from bourbon and gives it its mellow character. The charcoal is made on-site by burning ricks of maple. Here's the irony pilots and visitors love: Lynchburg sits in Moore County, which is dry — for most of the distillery's modern history you could tour the world-famous whiskey operation but not legally buy a drink in the town that makes it. (Commemorative bottles are now sold at the distillery itself.)
Huntsville is where Wernher von Braun and his team built the rockets that reached the Moon, and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center is where that story is told — the official visitor center for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, a Smithsonian affiliate, and the home of Space Camp. The crown jewel is real: the Saturn V Dynamic Test Vehicle (SA-500D), a National Historic Landmark, lies on its side full-length inside the Davidson Center so you can walk the entire 363 feet of moon rocket. Outside, a full-scale Saturn V replica stands vertical as a landmark visible for miles. Also here: Pathfinder, the world's only full-stack Space Shuttle display, an Apollo command module, and more than 1,500 artifacts.
The largest exposed mass of granite in the world — a 825-foot bald dome of solid quartz monzonite rising abruptly from the Piedmont forest 16 miles east of downtown Atlanta. The visible dome is the tip of a pluton that extends nine miles into the earth. The north face carries the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world (190 feet wide, 90 feet tall) depicting Confederate generals Lee, Jackson, and Davis on horseback — a controversial monument carved between 1923 and 1972. The mountain's base is a state park with a lake, gondola, and walk-up trail to the summit. From the air the dome reads as a single bare gray-pink stone in a sea of green.