Huntsville International (Carl T. Jones Field)

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 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.)

Two small studios in northwest Alabama produced a wildly disproportionate share of 20th-century American popular music. FAME Studios at 603 East Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals (founded 1959 by Rick Hall) recorded Aretha Franklin's breakthrough "I Never Loved a Man" (1967), Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally" and "Land of 1000 Dances," Etta James's "Tell Mama," Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, and dozens more — the "Muscle Shoals Sound." Hall's famous rhythm section (the Swampers — Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, David Hood, Jimmy Johnson) broke off in 1969 to open their own room at 3614 Jackson Highway in Sheffield, where they recorded the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses" (December 1969, three days of sessions captured on tape and film), plus Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album, Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll," Paul Simon, the Staple Singers, Cher, and Bob Dylan. Both studios are open for public tours and still actively record. Helen Keller's birthplace Ivy Green is six miles east in Tuscumbia — Keller was born June 27, 1880 in a small white cottage on the family property; the pump where Anne Sullivan first communicated the word "water" to seven-year-old deaf-blind Helen by spelling it into her hand is still there.

A civilian aviation museum near Birmingham holding nearly 100 aircraft and the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame — and one airplane with a story unlike any other in the collection. In 1943 a B-25C Mitchell bomber went down in Lake Murray, South Carolina during a training exercise; the crew escaped, and the bomber sank to 150 feet, where it sat for sixty-two years and became a dive site. In 2005 a salvage team raised it from the bottom of the lake. Those recovered remains are now conserved and displayed here — a WWII bomber that spent most of its existence underwater. The rest of the museum runs from early flight through the jet age, with a Tuskegee Airmen focus fitting for Alabama.