Findlay, OH
Downtown Findlay landmark, serving square hamburgs and frozen malts since 1936, when Hoyt "Stub" Wilson, the Kewpee licensee up in Lima, opened his own shop in a yellow building the width of a subway car. The Kewpee family resemblance is still on the plate: square patties, malts thick enough to need a spoon, homemade chili from the original era, pies and donuts made in house. The wall carries photos of the famous who stopped in, Johnny Mathis to Dan Quayle to Joe Biden on the 2008 trail, and Courier reporters still work the counter for man-on-the-street quotes. Open Monday through Saturday from 10, closed Sundays; the lobby can lock up before the drive-thru's 7 pm close, so make it a lunch stop.
Findlay is home to Marathon Petroleum (Fortune 50) and Cooper Tire — significant corporate jet traffic. Known as the "Flag City USA" — it's the only city authorized by Congress to fly the American flag year-round in this manner. Hancock County is northwest Ohio farmland with some of the flattest, most fertile land in the state. The University of Findlay anchors the town.
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.
Toledo earned its nickname "The Glass City" the year Edward Drummond Libbey moved his New England Glass Works here in 1888; Owens and Libbey-Owens-Ford followed, and the city became the center of American glass. Libbey and his wife Florence founded the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901, and it grew into one of the finest regional museums in the country — more than 30,000 works, free to enter. Its glass collection spans 3,500 years, and Toledo is where the Studio Glass movement was born in 1962. The Glass Pavilion across the street — a building of curving, almost entirely glass walls — was the first US work by the Japanese architecture firm SANAA. Toledo Express sits well west of the city, so the museum is a ride into the downtown art district.
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.
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.