Marion, IN
Stephen Payne left Yorkshire on a pilgrimage to James Dean's hometown, fell for Grant County, and stayed to open this place in 2005: fish and chips, bangers and mash, sticky toffee pudding, and frozen custard, with produce from their own garden. Dean's Fairmount is a short drive south; he was raised on his uncle's farm there, the James Dean Gallery anchors the small downtown, and he's buried at Park Cemetery, with festival crowds every September. Fly in for the pilgrimage; eat at the restaurant the pilgrimage built. Open daily from 11 am.
Marion's field carried airline service for a generation: Lake Central DC-3s began scheduled stops in 1956, Allegheny inherited the route in the 1968 merger and flew it with French-built N 262s, and the last scheduled airline left in 1970, with small commuters trailing off through the seventies. Today it is 506 acres three miles southwest of town, two runways with high-intensity lighting on the primary, forty based aircraft, and a fly-in tradition; the annual Fly-In Cruise-In has run here for more than three decades. The town's other claim sits five miles south: James Dean was born in Marion in 1931, and Fairmount, where he was raised and buried, is just down the road.
James Dean was born in Marion in 1931 and raised on his aunt and uncle's farm outside Fairmount, the town that buried him at Park Cemetery in 1955 and never stopped remembering. The James Dean Museum downtown, grown out of the Fairmount Historical Museum, holds the largest collection of his belongings anywhere, on loan from the Winslow family: two of his motorcycles, movie props, and a replica of his childhood bedroom with the actual furniture. The last full weekend of every September the festival swells this town of about 2,500 to something like 40,000, with a car show, a parade, and the look-alike contest. Fairmount's other export is Garfield; creator Jim Davis grew up on a nearby farm with a lot of barn cats.
The only active circular paved airport in America. During WWII (the concrete mat went down in the fall of 1943), the U.S. Navy poured an 1,800-foot-wide octagonal landing surface here as a satellite field for NAS Bunker Hill. The design let pilots land in any wind direction — a concept that sounds logical but creates more problems than it solves (guaranteed crosswind on a curved surface). After the war, the Navy left and tiny Converse, Indiana inherited the strangest runway in the country. A single painted runway was added later, but the octagonal pad remains. It went viral in 2025 when a pilot found it on Google Maps and called it 'the weirdest airport in America.' Fly over it and the shape is unmistakable — a geometric anomaly in a sea of Indiana farmland. Land if you dare (1800ft!).
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.
Originally Bunker Hill Naval Air Station (1942), then a Strategic Air Command base that stood nuclear alert through the Cold War before drawing down to a joint civil-military Air Reserve base in 1994. Renamed for astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom, the Indiana native born in Mitchell (southern Indiana, about 130 miles south of Peru). The outdoor aircraft display includes a B-47 Stratojet, B-58 Hustler, F-14 Tomcat, and A-10 Warthog — all visible from pattern altitude. The 12,500ft military runway occasionally hosts KC-135 tanker operations.