Kansas City, MO
Opened 1972 with a distinctive three-ring "drive-up" terminal — passengers could be dropped at gates with minimal walking. After 9/11, the design proved difficult to retrofit for modern security. A new single-terminal design opened in February 2023, ending a half-century of the rings. Historically a TWA stronghold.
The last large intact tallgrass prairie in North America — and one of the most thoroughly extinct ecosystems on the continent. Before European settlement, tallgrass prairie covered 170 million acres from Indiana to Kansas. Less than 4% survives today; the rest was plowed into farmland by 1900. The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, established 1996 in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas near Strong City, protects 10,894 acres — the largest single tract of unplowed tallgrass in the U.S. The Flint Hills survived because the rocky limestone subsoil made plowing impossible: the land could only be grazed, not cropped, so the original sod stayed in place. Bison were reintroduced in 2009 (a herd of about 100 today). Big bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, and switchgrass grow to 8 feet tall by late summer. The Spring Hill / Z Bar Ranch headquarters is preserved as a working ranch with an 1881 limestone barn and house. The preserve sits at the convergence point where a co-managed NPS/Nature Conservancy/private-ranch model has kept the land intact.
The Katy Trail is the longest developed rails-to-trails route in America — about 240 miles of crushed-limestone path following the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas (the "MKT," or "Katy") railroad bed clear across the state. For much of its length it runs right along the north bank of the Missouri River, under the same towering bluffs Lewis and Clark passed in 1804, threading river towns like Rocheport, Hermann, and Augusta and the state's growing wine country. It's a flat, car-free corridor through the Missouri River Valley — cyclists ride the whole thing over several days.
When the Bagnell Dam plugged the Osage River in 1931, it backed up one of the most bizarrely shaped lakes in America. Lake of the Ozarks sprawls only 92 miles end to end but packs in roughly 1,150 miles of shoreline — more coastline than the state of California — because it follows the drowned, branching river valley up every hollow and creek. The serpentine main channel gave it the nickname "the Magic Dragon." It became the Midwest's great summer playground: marinas, lake houses, and the famous waterfront bars wedged into the coves. Ha Ha Tonka State Park, on a clear-water arm of the lake, adds the haunting stone ruins of a 1900s castle that burned in 1942, perched on a bluff above natural springs and sinkholes.
Madison County, Iowa, once had nineteen covered bridges; six survive, and they became unexpectedly famous when Robert James Waller's 1992 novel "The Bridges of Madison County" — and the 1995 Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep film shot here — turned them into a symbol of fleeting romance. The bridges were covered, the local story goes, to protect the expensive flooring timbers from the weather (the roof was cheaper to replace than the deck). The Roseman Bridge (1883) is the one central to the story; the Cedar, Hogback, and others dot the rolling farmland around Winterset — which is also the birthplace of John Wayne. It's quintessential Iowa: covered bridges, county-seat squares, and corn to the horizon.