On June 21, 2019 I decided to take the ultimate trip through Kansas. See all there is to see. It took me 2 days, I traveled a total of 1,378 miles, and I made it back to work on time!
It was 3:30am when my alarm went off so I tried to not wake anyone up as I packed up my stuff and headed out to the car. By 4am I was on my way north to the western Kansas border. I’d just like to quickly say that sunrises are one of my least favorite things to be driving through in a car because you are blinded for the duration of the sunrise. A sunset is tough too, but I think a sunrise sucks more. Some people say Kansas is the most boring state, but they are wrong! Iowa is my least favorite for now. Anyways, now I was going to visit a friend and go underground.
The first destination of the day was Mt. Sunflower, the highest point in Kansas at 4,039ft. I’ll admit most of the drive there wasn’t interesting because it was mostly dirt farming roads. It took ages to get there and was very flat.
The next stop was right off of I-70 in Kansas’s north western corner. The worlds largest Art Easel. It even had a Van Gogh painting on it. It’s quite tall at 80ft and weighing 22.5 tons. I was a bit astonished because it made the local water tower look small.
I really didn’t stay that long, maybe 20 minutes. Next I headed onto I-70 East, but I quickly detoured onto a smaller highway because there seemed to be a speed trap at each exit. Too many cops for me. I was heading towards Nicodemus NHS in the middle of nowhere Kansas. After I got the stamp and patch I looked around the village a bit before moving on. The goal of the day was to visit the Geographic center of the lower 48 states in America.
Not only was there a sign, but also a USA flag and a mini one room chapel. It was actually quite worth the trip. It’s a nice feeling when you are at the center of the United States. Surprisingly there were others interested in this place like me. I ended up being super close to the southern border of Nebraska so next I drove 20 minutes north to take a picture of the sign.
Heading south I drove for an hour before I stopped to rest next to the worlds largest ball of twine. It is really made out of twine and weighs around 18k Lbs. Frank Stoeber started it back in 1953. I saw it on google maps and had to stop by!
After the sort of brief stop in Cawker City, KS I continued south to the worlds largest Czech Egg. It’s a massive 20 ft tall, 15ft wide, and it’s beautifully designed. I saw it on a website a few days before the trip and decided to add it to the itinerary. As this was the last stop before the final destination I took my time. It turns out most of the town is centered around this egg and there are even events related to it, which I found neat.
Ok so by this point I was pretty tired. Overall it was the 2nd longest drive on a Philmont off day clocking in at 884 miles driven in one day. (The longest drive ever achieved in one Philmont off day was last October.) I ended the day by meeting my old coworker friend Alex and getting dinner at a local Mexican restaurant. I crashed at his house that night. 🙂 Thank you Alex!
June 22, 2019 was the day I’d return to Philmont so I could get to work on time the following day. It was tight, but I wasn’t late to work. I got up at 8am ish and we headed to the Cosmosphere in downtown Hutchinson, KS. It’s basically a big space museum and houses some of the original Nasa artifacts like the original Apollo 13 space capsule. It was really cool and I’d totally recommend. The main point of the whole trip to Kansas was to meet up with my friend and go see Strataca. It’s a huge underground salt mine. We got the tickets to the Dark Ride and Salt Mine express upon arrival. (I think these are the two rides we did.) It takes 90 seconds to descend the 650 ft to the bottom of the mine.
The elevator operator turned the lights off so it was pitch black on the way down to give a sense of what it would be like if you were a miner. Once at the bottom there was a very long hallway made of salt and it was rather cold. Brrr In addition to providing tons of salt, Strataca is a storage facility for old films and movie set props. I got to see the original Mr. Freeze suit from the Batman and Robin movie. It was very cool. Literally!
We walked around a mining museum at the bottom before our first tour. Essentially whatever you bring into the mine…stays in the mine. There’s old digging machines, a pickup truck, old trash from the 1960s, and even dynamite boxes stacked in seams in the walls. The first tour we went on was the Salt Mine Express. It’s a mini train ride through part of the old section of the mine and shows off some of the old relics left behind.
It was a very cool tour and at the end we headed to the gift shop so I could search for a souvenir before the next tour. About 20 minutes later Alex and I went to get in line for the Dark Ride. On this ride we went into some of the deeper tunnels and the conductor turned off all the lights. I got to hear ‘absolute silence’ amid the pitch blackness. It was just as cool as it was in Jewel Caves in South Dakota, but that’s a story for another day. Not too long after that I headed back up to the hot Kansas surface, said goodbye to Alex, and headed back west towards Philmont.
Before getting back to the ranch I stopped at a few more places. The first being Ft. Larned NHS in Larned, KS.
It doesn’t look like much, but you can actually walk through all the buildings and there’s a little trail back to where the military tents would’ve been. The best part was that I got to watch the expert blacksmith craft a cool ‘s hook’ for me. It didn’t take that long and was very cool to watch. It highly recommend this as it’s fun to talk to him and it’s free.
Of course after this I smelled a bit like smoke because the blacksmith was smokey. After driving about an hour south through some swamps and fields I made it to Greensburg, KS. Home of the Big Well museum. Back in 2007 an EF 5 tornado ripped through the town and destroyed 95% of the structures there. The Big Well is…a well obviously. You can enter and walk down almost to the bottom.
I thought it was worth checking out. The last stop on the way back was at Sonic in Hugoton, KS. This town is where I had the most stressful car breakdown ever, but this we’ll save this story for another day. After dinner I started up the time lapse feature on my iphone, set it up on the dashboard, and hoped it wouldn’t overheat. At the bottom of this blog I’ve uploaded a 300 mi time lapse of Kansas. Near the end of the time lapse you can see a huge wall of clouds off in the distance. This wall of clouds turned out to be a massive lightning storm. This was one of the few times I wanted to wait it out. It was that big. Lightning forking across the sky, hail so loud you couldn’t hear the radio at max volume, and strong winds. I had no choice, but to power through it as work was the next morning and the detour to avoid the storm was 300 miles. I didn’t have time for that. Made it through, but wew that is a storm I’ll never forget. Anyways I logged the return drive at a minor 494 miles. So a short drive. That’s it for this post. See you later!
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