Kokomo, IN
Kokomo's brewpub on the south side of town: slow-smoked barbecue from their own smoker, seven beers brewed on site, and hand-cut aged Delmonico for the steak crowd. Warm brewers rolls with cinnamon butter open the meal; the breaded pork tenderloin gets singled out in reviews. Open daily from 11 am, lunch through dinner, seven days.
Kokomo was an airline stop for a generation: Delta DC-3s first worked the field in late 1947, Lake Central followed around 1950, and scheduled service held on until Allegheny pulled out in 1969-70. What the airlines left behind is a serious piece of infrastructure for a city field; two grooved 150-foot-wide runways, six thousand feet on the long one, and an ILS to runway 23. Sixty aircraft call it home, the self-serve avgas pump runs around the clock, and a warbird from the Commemorative Air Force's Indiana Wing is based on the field.
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.
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.
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.