Winamac, IN
Pulaski County's GA airport along the Tippecanoe River. Tippecanoe River State Park is just north — the river is one of Indiana's designated National Wild & Scenic Rivers, with excellent low-altitude scenic flying through the wooded valley.
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.
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.
On the shores of Lake Shafer since 1926 — "There's more than corn in Indiana." A nostalgic Midwestern boardwalk amusement park with classic wooden coasters, rides, and a beach. Briefly closed in 2020, reopened by new owners and operating since. The narrow, twisting Tippecanoe River reservoirs (Lake Shafer and Lake Freeman) create some of the best low-altitude scenic flying in northwestern Indiana — like flying along silver ribbons through farmland.
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.