McKinney National

A Smithsonian-affiliate museum on the southeast corner of Dallas Love Field, telling the story of flight with a strong Dallas-Fort Worth accent. Love Field itself is part of the story: the Army built it as a pilot-training base in October 1917 and named it for Lt. Moss Lee Love, an Army pilot killed in a 1913 crash — he'd never even been to Dallas, but his mother was a native. Inside the 100,000-square-foot building are 30-plus aircraft and some genuine oddities: the Chance Vought V-173 "Flying Pancake" (a real disc-shaped experimental fighter), the Apollo 7 command module, a restored 1918 Curtiss Jenny actually used at Love Field, and an extensive Southwest Airlines history exhibit. A retired Southwest 737 protrudes from the back of the hangar.

Reunion Tower has marked the southwest edge of downtown Dallas since April 1978. Locals call it The Ball. The 561-foot tower carries a geodesic sphere on three slim concrete shafts, topped with 259 LED lights that change color and pattern through the year — green for St. Patrick's Day, red-white-and-blue for July 4, holiday animations every December. The observation level — the GeO-Deck, named for the geodesic shape — sits at 470 feet. The name "Reunion" comes from La Réunion, a French utopian colony founded on this site in 1855; it failed within 18 months. When the tower's lights first came on in 1978, traffic on highways leading into downtown stopped. Police and fire switchboards were overloaded for fifteen minutes. The Ball appears in the opening credits of every season of the television series Dallas.

In 1978, two Waco teenagers hiking along a creek bed off the Bosque River pulled a bone out of an eroding bank and assumed it was from a cow. The bone was 3 feet long. They took it to Baylor's Strecker Museum, where it was identified as the femur of a Columbian mammoth — Mammuthus columbi, the largest mammoth species ever to roam North America, weighing up to 10 tons. What lay underground turned out to be the only known nursery herd of Pleistocene mammoths in the United States: adult females and juveniles found together as they died, possibly in successive flooding events about 65,000 years ago. The site has yielded 24 mammoths plus a Western camel, a saber-tooth tooth, giant tortoise, and alligator remains. Excavation ran in two phases (1978-1990 and 1990-1997). The 107-acre site opened to the public in December 2009 and was designated a National Monument by President Obama on July 10, 2015 — managed jointly by the National Park Service, the City of Waco, and Baylor University. Visitors walk a paved 300-yard path from the welcome center to the Dig Shelter, where fossils remain in their original positions in the bank.

Caddo Lake is the only natural lake in Texas (every other lake in the state is man-made). The lake was formed by a massive log jam on the Red River in the early 1800s — though legend credits an earthquake. From the air, Caddo Lake looks nothing like a typical lake: it's a maze of bayous, sloughs, and cypress-lined channels draped in Spanish moss. The ancient bald cypress trees standing in the water create patterns that look more like Louisiana swamp than Texas. The lake straddles the Texas-Louisiana border and is one of the most ecologically significant wetlands in the South.