Elizabethtown, KY
Closest GA airport to Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park — the small log cabin (well, a symbolic cabin in a Beaux-Arts memorial building) where Lincoln was born in 1809. Knob Creek, where Lincoln spent ages 2-7, is also nearby. Elizabethtown sits between Louisville and the Mammoth Cave region. Fort Knox (the gold depository) is just north — restricted airspace, but visible from a respectful distance.
The 110-acre farm where Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. The Memorial Building (1911, designed by John Russell Pope) is a Beaux-Arts neoclassical temple containing a symbolic log cabin meant to evoke (though not actually be) the birth cabin. The 56 steps leading to the entrance represent the years of Lincoln's life. The Sinking Spring — the actual water source for the Lincoln family — still flows. Pair with Knob Creek Farm 10 miles away, where Lincoln spent ages 2-7 and his earliest memories were formed.
Heaven Hill is the second-largest American whiskey producer and the largest independent family-owned distillery in the world — founded 1935 in Bardstown by the Shapira family and still owned by their descendants. The company operates 64 barrel warehouses (rickhouses) scattered across the Nelson County countryside, each holding roughly 20,000 oak barrels of aging bourbon. The rickhouses are seven-story timber-framed buildings painted black; the black coloring is partly tar paper and partly a wild fungus called Baudoinia compniacensis, which thrives on the ethanol vapor escaping the barrels — the so-called "angel's share." The fungus coats every surface within range of a working warehouse, including the rickhouses themselves and nearby trees, road signs, and houses.
Two miles east of the Bardstown field stands Federal Hill, the 1818 mansion better known as My Old Kentucky Home. Stephen Foster is said to have been inspired here to write the ballad that became Kentucky's state song — the one the crowd sings every year before the Derby. It became Kentucky's first state-owned park in 1923, and "The Stephen Foster Story" has played its outdoor amphitheater every summer since 1959. Bardstown around it bills itself the Bourbon Capital of the World, so the black rickhouses of Heaven Hill are right next door on the same downwind.
The longest known cave system in the world — 426+ miles mapped and counting, with much more presumed undiscovered. From the air you see the rolling hardwood forests of the Mammoth Cave plateau; below you, an entirely separate world. The cave was a Native American ceremonial site for thousands of years (mummies, archeological tools survive deep inside), a saltpeter mine during the War of 1812, the world's second-oldest tourist attraction (since 1816), and is now a National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Surface above is karst topography — sinkholes, springs, and the Green River winding through limestone canyons.