I’m bumping this thread of mine. The trip will start in one week, July 20th.
My mother and I will be taking a roughly clockwise trip, we have decided.
We hope to see Big Brutus, the Cosmosphere, the salt mine, the Garden of Eden, St Fidelis church in Victoria, the geographical center of the 48 contiguous states, and the Eisenhower museum in Abilene. We may be able to tuck in a couple of other sites if they can fit.
I’ve had a recommendation to eat at the Anchor Inn in Hutchinson.
We’ll be carrying a cooler with drinks and some basic stuff like bread and cheese for sandwiches. Hopefully we can get coffee at motels/hotels along the way.
I want to thank all the earlier responders for their ideas. Too bad we don’t have a month to spend, and see everything you told us about.
Last minute caveats or recommendations for accomodations/food?
If you’re that close to the U.S. center then you’re within a couple of miles of the cabin where the poem that became Home On The Range was written. The unofficial anthem of the American west began right there.
When I lived in Kansas, my son had chicken pox, and after 5 days he felt tine, but they wouldn’t let him back in school for two weeks. After a couple days moping around the house, I threw him in the car and said Let’s go for a ride. We were gone for four days, camped out free at the state lakes (most counties have one), went to funky museums like the barbed wire museum, and the state fish hatchery. Took field guides of birds and trees and wildflowers, and stopped and looked for and identified those. Ate peanut butter and baloney sandwiches and a few rings of dried figs and a pizza or two. Stopped and talked to farmers on gravel roads, which is what we mostly drove on. There’s always lots to do in Kansas.
Here;s another thought, if you are going this time of year. Take along a Coleman stove and a cooking pot, and stop every morning at a roadside farm stand or a truck in town and buy fresh-picked sweet corn, and cook it up and eat it for lunch at a park in the next town. You can do that every day. Not just in Kansas, but anywhere in the Midwest or east. My wife and I did it it every day all the way to Nova Scotia, where we boiled a lobster on the beach instead.
Pronghorn Antelope were nearly extirpated in Kansas, but have been reintroduced. The present population is about 2,000, and hunting permits are issued.
Westmoreland has the world’s second-largest hand dug well which is pretty cool. And you can see wheel ruts from the Oregon trail there. It’s also in the Flint Hills. My maternal grandparents are from the area. My Grandpa would have sent you to Tuttle Creek Dam & Reservoir.
I’ve been to the Eisenhower museum in Abilene a couple of times and enjoyed that, even as a kid.
And I’ve been to Logan (where my paternal grandparents are from) several times. Logan has the Dane G. Hansen Museum (local guy who got rich on oil, I think) and a chalk quarry or something. I never went on the chalk expeditions because I was a girl.
It sounds odd to say a trip to see a big(second largest ever) earthmover is worth the trip, but it is.
Until you go up to it you don’t realize how monstrous it is. The treads alone are over seven feet from ground to top. Each link of tread weighs a ton!
You can even go up onto it, into the main body of it, but that means climbing narrow little stairs almost four stories up and I have a fear of heights. So I mostly walked around it and looked at other pieces of mining history that are in the museum park.
There’s also a nice indoor museum of mining and union history, plus of course plenty of souvenirs to buy. I got some post cards.
See it if you ever can. The admission to all exhibits was just $8, less for kids and seniors.
I grew up in Kansas (KC area) and when I was about 13, about 20 years ago, my mother decided to take me on a grand tour of our home state. She’d never done it and since she’d had wild success taking my little sister on a grand tour of Missouri, this would be a great idea.
Turns out, Kansas is pretty boring compared to Missouri. We spent most of the three days flipping through the tour book and trying to find anything worth seeing.
However, I do have some lasting memories of the trip. The Garden of Eden was amazing and creepy. The geographical center was a plaque in the middle of nowhere; didn’t find it to be worth it.
The Cosmosphere and Eisenhower museum we saw on separate trips. Cosmosphere is awesome. Eisenhower museum is pretty good.
Ooh, forgot to mention that another highlight of our trip was Lindsborg. Don’t know if it’s still this way, but it was absolutely Twilight Zone-level charming. Scandinavian horse sculptures everywhere, super-nice people, empty streets, bright colors. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
I want to get this posted before it’s way too late. I haven’t looked at a map to see if it’s even feasible relative to where you’re going or have already been, but the hands down best steak dinner I have ever eaten was at a place called Cohen’s Chicken on a Tray in Junction City.
Also, very near the Eisenhower museum in Abilene is the Racing Greyhound Hall of Fame and Museum.
Well, we spent five hours almost at the Cosmosphere. I learned some amazing history and saw some “out of this world” artifacts. Saw the planetarium show, the kids demo Dr. Goddard’s lab, and the Dome theater show about D-Day. Plus a “shuttle simulator”(my mom didn’t ride it, that takes you through a space battle. Wonderful experience.
At dinner at a Mexican restaurant some friend at home recommended, The Anchor Inn. Fair warning, the portions are HUGE, as well as reasonably priced. I couldn’t finish the food I ordered and had to leave it as we couldn’t take it along. Eat there is you go to Hutchinson.
If your in Hutchinson stay at Hendrick’s Exotic Animal Farm and Bed and Breakfast. They have zebras, camels, kangaroos and lots of other animals you can experience up close.
Somewhere out in western Kansas off of I70 there is this giant Monet you can drive by and see.
So on Tuesday my mother and I visited Stratica, the salt mine museum and tour.
You go down 650 feet into the earth, further down than the St Louis Arch is high. The museum and tours are set up in a portion of the complex that was last worked in the 1950’s. Everything is one huge room that goes on forever into the darkness. There’s a museum, a tram tour and a train tour. Before the train tour part of the safety video says not to touch the side walls. Partly it’s because your could cut yourself. Then, on the tram tour, you learn that trash was not hauled to the surface, and neither were certain other “materials” So, don’t lick the walls.
We drove to Hays and stayed there last night. Don’t ever stay in the Econolodge. So this morning we visited the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, which has one of the most remarkable collections of fossils in the world.
Then we traveled east to the small town of Victoria, Kansas, to see St. Fidelis Church, called “the cathedral of the plains” Built from 1908 to 1911, at one time it was the largest church west of the Missisisippi. You really will miss out on something special if you don’t visit, and it’s only a couple miles south of I-70.
Then we traveled to Lucas Kansas to see the Garden of Eden, a collection of wierd statues and concrete sculptures built by one S.P. Dinsmoor. Look it up on Roadside America. The dude is buried there, in a mausoleum, and the coffin has a glass face plate so you can look at what’s left of him.
We are now in Abilene Kansas and tomorrow will visit the Eisenhower Museum.
We visited the Eisenhower Museum on Thursday, in Abilene. I learned a lot about him that I’d never known, and a lot of WWII history as well. We toured the little house where he lived as a boy, which is part of the same complex that includes the Presidential Library and the chapel where Eisenhower, his wife Mamie, and a child of theirs that died, are buried.
This morning, Friday, we visited the Seelye mansion in Abilene. It was built in the early 1900’s by a guy named A. B. Seelye, who made a fortune in patent medicines. http://www.seelyemansion.org/ Really, if you get the chance it’s worth the tour, I promise. Easy access from I-70, make the side trip!
Like I said, don’t stay at the Econolodge in Hays, their ice machince wasn’t working, and neither was their vending machince, and we only found that out after checking in. But the Comfort Inn in Hutchinson was nice, and so was the Super 8 in Abilene. Last night we ate dinner at a place in Abilene called the M&R Grill. Good food there too, I couldn’t finish the chicken fried steak sandwich I ordered, and the margarita I ordered was way bigger than I expected as well.
I’m happy to be home, as I’m about to go pick up my dog from the vet where I boarded him. But part of me wishes I was still traveling.
One thing I forgot to mention, from the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, in Hays, Kansas.
Currently an exhibit is running that shows all 22 species of rattlesnakes found in Kansas. It’s called “From Fear to Fassssssssscination” Some rattlers are quite small, some much larger. In on display I noticed a small white mouse building itself a little nest in the corner of the cage, not knowing the fate that was eventually in store for it. I pointed him out to my mother, and some kids touring the exhibit overheard and came over to see. The were glued to that cage, not knowing the snake would probably go a **long **time before taking it’s cage buddy.