Somerset, KY
Lake Cumberland Regional sits on the rolling Pulaski County uplands above the Cumberland River. The lake itself — formed by the 1952 completion of Wolf Creek Dam — covers 65,530 acres at full pool and is the houseboat capital of the world; the region rents more houseboats than anywhere else on earth. Cumberland Falls State Park, twenty-five miles south, hosts the only regularly visible moonbow in the western hemisphere — a lunar rainbow visible on clear nights near a full moon, where the 68-foot falls throw enough mist for the moon's light to refract. The Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, with its arches and sandstone gorges, lies just south of the field. Wolf Creek Dam itself, which holds back the lake, was rebuilt with a half-billion-dollar barrier wall between 2007 and 2013 after seepage threatened a catastrophic failure that would have flooded Nashville.
The field is literally named Lake Cumberland Regional, and the lake is the reason to come. Backed up behind the 258-foot Wolf Creek Dam since 1951, Lake Cumberland sprawls 101 miles end to end with more than 1,250 miles of shoreline folded into a hundred coves. It's the self-styled Houseboat Capital of the World — the planet's densest cluster of houseboat builders — and on a summer afternoon you'll see whole marinas of them fanned out below. From pattern altitude the water is a sprawling blue oak-leaf shape pressed into the green Cumberland Plateau.
Deep in the Daniel Boone forest southwest of London-Corbin, the Cumberland River drops 68 feet over a ledge 125 feet wide — the "Niagara of the South." What makes it singular is what happens at night: on clear evenings around a full moon, the mist throws a moonbow, a lunar rainbow. It's the only predictable moonbow in the Western Hemisphere — the only rival on Earth is Victoria Falls in Africa. The falls face and flow north, which is exactly why the geometry works. From the air it's a white horseshoe of whitewater set in unbroken green ridges.
You'll fly almost directly over this one — Keeneland sits on Versailles Road right off the end of Blue Grass Airport, less than a mile out. Opened in 1936 as a rare non-profit racetrack, its hand-chiseled limestone grandstand is widely considered the most beautiful in American racing, and Keeneland Sales is the premier thoroughbred auction house on the planet. Immediately beside it is Calumet Farm — 762 acres of red-trimmed white barns, a sycamore-lined drive, and white-bordered paddocks, the most successful operation in Kentucky Derby history with ten winners. Together, off your wingtip on departure or arrival, they're the postcard of the Horse Capital of the World.
Heaven Hill is the second-largest American whiskey producer and the largest independent family-owned distillery in the world — founded 1935 in Bardstown by the Shapira family and still owned by their descendants. The company operates 64 barrel warehouses (rickhouses) scattered across the Nelson County countryside, each holding roughly 20,000 oak barrels of aging bourbon. The rickhouses are seven-story timber-framed buildings painted black; the black coloring is partly tar paper and partly a wild fungus called Baudoinia compniacensis, which thrives on the ethanol vapor escaping the barrels — the so-called "angel's share." The fungus coats every surface within range of a working warehouse, including the rickhouses themselves and nearby trees, road signs, and houses.