Midland, Odessa & the Permian Basin

A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.

A CCC drive looping up Scenic Mountain, a 200-foot bluff above the town that grew around the only dependable spring within sixty miles of open Llano country.

The small 1939 frame house on West Ohio Avenue where George and Barbara Bush raised their young family in Midland's 1950s oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site.

A restored World War II hangar on the old air base above Big Spring, telling the story of the bombardier school of 1942 and of Webb Air Force Base, which trained pilots until 1977.

A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.

Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.

Midland's art and science museum in the 1937 house of oilman Fred Turner and his wife Juliette, with added galleries, a children's museum and a planetarium on the grounds.

Big Spring's fifteen-story hotel of 1930, built on ranch oil money, once the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, empty and roosted in by pigeons for decades and now restored.

Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.