Uvalde, TX
Opened 2016 in the old Hangar 6 — during WWII this was one of the top-ranking AAF pilot training schools. Classic American diner fare with Tex-Mex on the menu. Active duty military eat free. Walk right up from the ramp. Playground for kids.
Garner Field was a WWII primary flight training base where Army Air Corps cadets learned to fly in PT-19 trainers before advancing to more powerful aircraft. The Uvalde Aviation Museum in a historic hangar preserves this legacy. Former Vice President John Nance Garner was from Uvalde — the airport bears his name. The surrounding brush country is some of the best quail and deer hunting land in Texas.
The original site of the Stinson School of Flying — established 1915 by Katherine Stinson (4th American woman to earn a pilot's license), her sister Marjorie (youngest American woman to earn a pilot's license at age 18), brother Eddie, and mother Emma. The school trained Allied pilots for World War I, including Canadian Royal Flying Corps cadets who couldn't train in Canadian winters. Katherine was the first woman authorized by the US Postal Service to fly the airmail (1918), one of the first pilots of any gender to perform a loop, and the first American woman to fly in Asia. Brother Eddie founded the Stinson Aircraft Company in 1925, which produced the Detroiter, Reliant, and L-5 Sentinel — Eddie was killed in a 1932 air crash. KSSF preserves the original 1915 field. The 1936 hangar still stands.
Five Spanish colonial missions stretching along the San Antonio River form the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Texas. The Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero) is the most famous, but four others — Concepción, San José, San Juan, and Espada — form a remarkable chain visible as a series of stone compounds following the river south from downtown. Mission San José, the 'Queen of the Missions,' is the most architecturally intact. From the air, the contrast between the 300-year-old mission compounds and the modern city surrounding them is striking. These missions were the northernmost extent of Spanish colonization in North America.
You'd fly into Gillespie County (T82) near Fredericksburg; the LBJ Ranch is at Stonewall, on the Pedernales. Lyndon Johnson was born on this land, governed from it, and died on it in 1973; he's the only president born and buried on the same ground, in the family cemetery by the river. From 1963 to 1969 the ranch house ran much of the federal government, with Johnson working a phone bank under the live oaks and a three-set TV array tuned to all three networks at once. The ranch had its own airstrip; Johnson commuted to Andrews in a Lockheed JetStar too small to be Air Force One, so the press called it Air Force One-Half. The airplane is still in the ranch hangar. The house, hangar, and JetStar have been closed since early 2024 for a $14 million rehab, reopening expected in 2027; the grounds, cemetery, and reconstructed birthplace stay open for the self-guided drive.
A massive pink granite dome rising 425 feet above the Texas Hill Country. The exposed batholith covers 640 acres and is over 1 billion years old — one of the oldest exposed rock surfaces in North America. Native Americans believed the rock was enchanted because it groans and creaks at night (thermal expansion). The dome is unmistakable from the air — a bare pink hemisphere surrounded by green oak woodland. Nearby Fredericksburg was founded by German settlers in 1846.