Rochester, IN
Few fields let you shut down and walk to breakfast without touching the courtesy car; this is one of them. Rochester Dining sits just down State Road 25 from the ramp. Inside it's an honest family diner: breakfast served all day, skillets, omelets, biscuits and gravy, blueberry pancakes, with burgers and comfort plates once the morning's over. It stays busy with regulars and the reviews are solid. Open seven days from 7 am; weekdays run to 8 pm, but Saturday and Sunday close at 3, so weekends are a breakfast-and-lunch stop.
About a 15-minute walk from the ramp, down on Lake Manitou, sits The Dam Landing; it's a real walk along the highway shoulder, not a stroll, but doable. It's a scratch-kitchen lake bar and grill with an outdoor beer garden, a dockside bar in good weather, and a wall of windows on the water. The menu runs tavern: hand-ground burgers, breaded and grilled tenderloins, chicken and waffles, smoked wings. The building has sat on the lake for over a century, opening as a fishing shack and serving as a hotel in the 1930s before becoming the grill it is now. Open Tuesday through Sunday from 11; closed Mondays, and it opens midday rather than morning, so it's a lunch-or-later stop.
Fulton County's field is where one of Indiana's oldest flying clubs landed for good. The Mentone Flying Club, born in 1957 with nine members and a single Aeronca Champ at Chick Herendeen's farm strip, moved here on Father's Day 1981 when the old Mentone airport closed; they named the meeting room Chick's Roost. More than 500 people have earned a license through the club, and two members went on to fly for presidents; one flew Lyndon Johnson, another flew charters for candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. A 5,000-foot grooved runway with a full parallel taxiway makes it an easy stop, and the club still serves its pancake breakfast on the ramp every summer.
Fulton County is the round barn capital of the world — over 17 historic round barns survive in the county, the highest concentration anywhere. The Fulton County Museum has exhibits on round barn architecture, a unique American innovation from the late 1800s. Lake Manitou itself — a glacier-formed kettle lake — has a folk legend of a lake monster reported by the Potawatomi in the 1830s. The Round Barn Festival each June celebrates the heritage. From above, the round barns dot the farmland like coins.
Lake Maxinkuckee is the second-largest natural lake in Indiana — a clear, spring-fed glacial lake of about 1,800 acres in the northern Indiana lake country. On its northwest shore sits the town of Culver, and on the lakefront sits one of the most distinctive prep schools in America: the Culver Academies, founded in 1894. Culver is best known for two things. The Culver Black Horse Troop is a mounted unit of cadets that has ridden in nearly every presidential inaugural parade since 1913 — a column of matched black horses that is one of the most recognizable units in American ceremonial life. And the Culver equestrian program is one of the largest school horse operations in the country, keeping a herd well over a hundred head, with a riding hall the size of a small arena. The campus is a collection of collegiate-gothic and Georgian buildings along the water, with a chapel and a memorial to alumni lost in the world wars. Culver''s summer naval program teaches seamanship on the lake from a fleet of sailing dinghies; the sailing and crew traditions are as old as the cavalry. Lake Maxinkuckee was a Gilded Age summer-resort lake — the humorist George Ade kept a place nearby, and cottages still ring the shore. The lake is a glacial kettle, gouged and then filled when the last ice sheet retreated, and its depth and clarity are unusual for Indiana.
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.