Athens, OH
The story is the sauce: in 1985 the owner of a restaurant called Casa Que Pasa skipped town and left a fully staffed room behind, so eight suddenly unemployed workers, a century of restaurant experience among them and no business experience at all, formed a worker-owned cooperative and kept cooking. Forty years on, Casa Nueva is the oldest worker co-op in southern Ohio: a third of the staff are owners, any employee can earn in, and the kitchen has been locavore since decades before the word existed, down to huevos rancheros on Shagbark Seed & Mill tortillas and house salsas sold by the pint since 1987. The owners jokingly call it hippie Mexican; the salsa verde and the margaritas in the Cantina make the argument. About 15 minutes from the field, then walk to OU's College Green after. Breakfast through late night most days; closed Tuesdays, and Friday and Saturday the Cantina runs to 2 am.
Ohio University's airport in southeast Ohio's rolling Appalachian foothills. The OU campus has one of the most beautiful collegiate quadrangles in America — College Green, with brick walks under century-old trees. Athens itself is a vibrant college town. The surrounding Wayne National Forest is some of the best fall flying in Ohio — Appalachian hills bursting in October color.
You're at Ohio University's own field, Snyder Field, in the hills of Athens. OU is the oldest university in the Northwest Territory, chartered in 1804 — its lineage runs back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its promise that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The College Green at the campus's heart, with Manasseh Cutler Hall facing true north, is a National Historic Landmark. Across the valley stand the Ridges — the former Athens Lunatic Asylum, a sprawling Kirkbride-plan hospital now owned by the university and home to an art museum. Athens is deep Appalachian-foothill country, eighty miles southeast of Columbus.
Ohio's most spectacular natural area — Carboniferous-era sandstone gorges with hemlock forests, waterfalls, and rock shelters. The famous spots: Old Man's Cave, Cedar Falls, Ash Cave (a massive 700-foot rock recess), Conkles Hollow (a 200-foot deep gorge), and Rock House (a true cave with windows in the cliff). From the air, the gorges cut through the rolling hills like green canyons. Spectacular fall color mid-October — one of Ohio's peak autumn destinations.
Few towns hand a pilot a better landmark than Zanesville. Where the Licking River meets the Muskingum, the road doesn't cross on one bridge — it crosses on a Y. The Y-Bridge is a three-legged span that meets midstream, so you can drive onto it and come off on the same bank you started from. There has been a Y-bridge here since 1814; the current one, the fifth, dates to 1902 and is on the National Register. Aviator Amelia Earhart is said to have called Zanesville the most recognizable city in the country because of it. The town sits on Zane's Trace, the pioneer road that ran from Wheeling all the way to Maysville, Kentucky.
Where the Scioto meets the Ohio, Portsmouth turned its flood defenses into art. Along roughly 2,000 feet of concrete floodwall, muralist Robert Dafford painted some fifty panels — 2,000 years of Ohio Valley history, from the Hopewell mound builders and the Shawnee through the steamboat era — one of the largest single-artist mural projects anywhere. (Dafford is the same hand behind the floodwall murals down the river at Maysville and Paducah, Kentucky.) Behind the town rise the ridges of Shawnee State Forest, the "Little Smokies of Ohio" and one of the state's largest forests. Greater Portsmouth's airport sits up in Minford, northeast of the river.