London, KY
Where Kentucky Fried Chicken began. Harland Sanders — born September 9, 1890 in Henryville, Indiana — opened a service station at 688 US 25 in 1930, served meals from a six-chair dining table in the back, bought the small restaurant nearby in 1932, and reopened the expanded café-and-motel complex on Independence Day 1940. He perfected the pressure-cooked Original Recipe (11 herbs and spices) during the 1940s. He sold the place in 1956 to begin franchising. The 1940 dining room is preserved, a model motel room sits in the museum, the original kitchen is recreated, and the operation is still a working KFC. On the National Register. The honorary title 'Colonel' was a Kentucky Colonel commission — not a military rank.
On-field pizza at the airport entrance on Hal Rogers Drive: Big City is the Lexington-born Kentucky chain that hand-tosses its dough, makes its own sauce, and runs an anything-goes topping culture, beer cheese to peaches. Calzones too. Open seven days, 11 to 10 weekdays, to 11 Friday and Saturday, Sunday noon to 9. The real reason to fly KLOZ is fifteen minutes south at the Sanders Cafe, where Kentucky Fried Chicken began.
London-Corbin Airport-Magee Field opened in October 1948 at the southern end of the Daniel Boone National Forest, between London and Corbin. Single asphalt runway 06/24, 5,751 by 150 feet; elevation 1,212 feet. The field exists in significant part because of what is across town in Corbin — the original Sanders Café, where Harland Sanders perfected pressure-cooked fried chicken in the 1940s and launched what became KFC. Cumberland Falls State Park, with the only regularly visible moonbow in the western hemisphere, is twenty miles south. Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park, on the old Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone cut from Cumberland Gap to Boonesborough, sits four miles east of the airport.
Deep in the Daniel Boone forest southwest of London-Corbin, the Cumberland River drops 68 feet over a ledge 125 feet wide — the "Niagara of the South." What makes it singular is what happens at night: on clear evenings around a full moon, the mist throws a moonbow, a lunar rainbow. It's the only predictable moonbow in the Western Hemisphere — the only rival on Earth is Victoria Falls in Africa. The falls face and flow north, which is exactly why the geometry works. From the air it's a white horseshoe of whitewater set in unbroken green ridges.
The field is literally named Lake Cumberland Regional, and the lake is the reason to come. Backed up behind the 258-foot Wolf Creek Dam since 1951, Lake Cumberland sprawls 101 miles end to end with more than 1,250 miles of shoreline folded into a hundred coves. It's the self-styled Houseboat Capital of the World — the planet's densest cluster of houseboat builders — and on a summer afternoon you'll see whole marinas of them fanned out below. From pattern altitude the water is a sprawling blue oak-leaf shape pressed into the green Cumberland Plateau.
About 46 nm east-southeast of Lexington — a real cross-country leg, not a quick hop — the Daniel Boone forest folds up into the Red River Gorge, a 29,000-acre maze of sandstone cliffs and more than 100 natural arches: the largest concentration of stone arches east of the Rockies, second in the country only to Arches National Park. Climbers know it simply as "the Red," some of the best sandstone in the world. The crown is Natural Bridge itself, a 78-foot sandstone span you can walk across, with a sky lift running up to it. From altitude it's a sea of forested ridges slashed with pale cliff lines and the thread of the Red River.
You'll fly almost directly over this one — Keeneland sits on Versailles Road right off the end of Blue Grass Airport, less than a mile out. Opened in 1936 as a rare non-profit racetrack, its hand-chiseled limestone grandstand is widely considered the most beautiful in American racing, and Keeneland Sales is the premier thoroughbred auction house on the planet. Immediately beside it is Calumet Farm — 762 acres of red-trimmed white barns, a sycamore-lined drive, and white-bordered paddocks, the most successful operation in Kentucky Derby history with ten winners. Together, off your wingtip on departure or arrival, they're the postcard of the Horse Capital of the World.