Touching down at Kirksville Regional Airport in Kirksville keeps you central, with surrounding cities and sights an easy drive away. Kirksville is a college town in the rolling farm country of northeast Missouri, home to Truman State University and the birthplace of osteopathic medicine. The pace is easy, the downtown square is tidy and walkable, and students keep the coffee shops and bars busier than you would expect for a town this size. Fall football Saturdays and spring graduation weekends give it a warm, familiar rhythm.

Good ways to fill a weekend around Kirksville: - Stroll the courthouse square for local shops and the Saturday farmers market - Visit the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine on the A.T. Still University campus - Hike, paddle, or fish at Thousand Hills State Park on Forest Lake - Catch a Truman State Bulldogs game or a campus concert - Spot petroglyphs left by early Native peoples at Thousand Hills - Tour the Amish farms and bakeries around nearby Jamesport

Kirksville also makes a comfortable base for the wider region. Hannibal, Mark Twain's boyhood home on the Mississippi, is about 90 minutes southeast, Columbia and the University of Missouri sit about 90 minutes south, and Ottumwa, Iowa, is just over an hour north. Closer in, the small towns of Macon and La Plata hold onto a slow Midwestern charm. Try a pork tenderloin sandwich wider than its bun, a regional specialty, and stay for a sunset over the lake.