Huntington, IN
The 1908 storefront where the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich is reputed to have been invented. Nick Freienstein started with a push cart and a dim lantern on the courthouse square; the hamburgers sold well enough to move indoors, and the breaded tenderloin became Indiana's signature order. It is genuinely larger than the bun, exactly as the form demands; finish with sugar cream pie, Indiana's unofficial state pie, or the three-slice pie flight. Dan Quayle ate here as a young Huntington lawyer, and when he joined the 1988 ticket he came back with the national press corps in tow. Breakfast and lunch only, 7 to 2, seven days a week; there is no dinner. A short walk away, the Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center covers the office itself in a renovated church, Tuesday through Friday; Indiana has produced six vice presidents.
Huntington is the hometown of Dan Quayle — 44th Vice President — and home to the Dan Quayle Center, the only Vice Presidential museum in the country. Also: Huntington is the place credited with inventing the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich, when Nick Frienstein started serving them at his stand here in 1904 and moved into the Nick's Kitchen storefront in 1908. That sandwich became Indiana's unofficial state food. The town sits on the Wabash River with a restored canal district downtown — Huntington was a key port on the Wabash & Erie Canal in the mid-19th century. The airport itself is a quiet single-runway field that sees the occasional pilgrimage flight when someone realizes how close lunch is to history.
The only museum in the world dedicated to the office of Vice President of the United States. Located in former VP Dan Quayle's hometown of Huntington, IN, the museum covers all 49 (and counting) Vice Presidents — from John Adams to the present. Quirky, unexpected, and surprisingly thorough — most visitors leave knowing more about the second-most-important office than they ever expected. A worthwhile detour for political and history fans.
The St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers join to form the Maumee River right in downtown Fort Wayne — a striking three-rivers confluence visible on approach to either KSMD or KFWA. The historic Old Fort site (a reconstructed 1815 fort) marks Fort Wayne's namesake. Promenade Park along the river has reinvented the downtown waterfront. Fort Wayne — Indiana's second-largest city — has the most extensive park system per capita of any major Midwest city, much of it along the rivers and visible from above.
One of America's rarest surviving early-20th-century airport hangars. Built in 1930 with massive Truscon Steel Company doors — the only example of their kind in the country at the time. During WWII, the hangar produced TDR-1 Assault Drones, an early version of the cruise missile. Famous visitors over the decades included Charles Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Wiley Post. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The future home of the National Airmail Museum, which signed an MOU in 2024 to lease and restore the hangar — they need to raise $5M+ to complete the project. Tour the field by ground after landing — the Carousel Hangar is the only example of Clark W. Smith's patented rotating-door design ever built.
This forest-ringed reservoir was the site of the last battle fought in Indiana between Native Americans and U.S. military forces (1812). The annual Mississinewa 1812 reenactment every October is one of the largest War of 1812 reenactments in the country — sometimes visible from the air as encampments along the shore. The reservoir itself is beautiful from altitude, surrounded by hardwood forest with minimal development.