Great Drives and Destinations: Kansas City to Dodge

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Kansas is a big, wide open state not unlike a smaller version of Texas. And its people are like the Texans, also: friendly, real and down to earth. Except they don’t brag in Kansas.

“I think we underestimate ourselves,” says Bridgette Jobe, director of tourism for Kansas City Kansas – Wyandotte County Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We sometimes don’t realize how special we are -- but we are what we are and we’re OK with that.”

We were OK with that, too, in our one-week 850-mile drive across the state where we found helpful country folk keen to show us their attractions, and gas stations in some small towns where customers locals and tourists filled up their tanks first then went in to pay, and laid-back restaurants whose menus still carried the prices of the 1980s (for example, two 24 oz. cans of beer for $3).

The Car

Chevrolet Cobalt LT. This was the nation’s heartland so we wanted an American car, a small one so we could see what 850 miles would cost drivers who didn’t feel they had to drive those open highways as if they were performing at the now-famous Kansas Speedway. The Chevrolet Cobalt LT seemed just right: a 2.2 L, 4-cylinder, double overhead cam, peppy little car as feisty as Buddy, our Cairn Terrier. The Cobalt claims 35 MPG. The base price was just over $15,000 but ABS added $400 and the 4-speed automatic transmission another $925. The model tested had cruise control (an extra priced at $275) but, used to the bumper to bumper traffic in Southern California, we were a bit out of the habit of using it.

Driving the 2008 small Chevy was comfortable, surely more than we would have experienced in the 1933 Chevrolet Eagle on display at the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka but the Cobalt would be a bit more expensive because the Eagle’s cost of $565 in ’33 would be $8960 in today’s dollars.

The spacious highways in Kansas reminded us how adequate a small car is if it’s not fighting traffic on congested interstates. We sailed along comfortably at speeds just above the posted ones with plenty of reserve speed coming from the 148 horses below the hood. The Cobalt weighs less than 2800 lbs which sure helps it move along. The trunk space of 13.9 cubic feet easily handled two suitcases and four small bags. We didn’t have to display any luggage on the rear seats though in this carefree land of Oz it probably would have been more safe there than anywhere else.

You would never forget that the state flower of Kansas is the sunflower. They grow freely along the highways and in such abundance and variety they could have made van Gogh more crazy.

The Drive

In a trip arranged by a local tour operator and then subsequently in our own drive we ended up visiting 20 museums. It seems a lot but we had two weeks in total. Furthermore, Kansas would be the first to acknowledge this is not a state with the scenery, say, of the American Southwest. The land is fairly flat so although you move right along the charm is essentially finding what’s at the end of the road as a destination attraction. Robert Louis Stevenson wasn’t thinking about Kansas when he said, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

Interstate 335 sweeping off to the Southwest from Kansas City brought us to the site of the 1856 Battle of Osawatomie, now John Brown Memorial Park. His statue stands there brooding over the challenges he and his fellow abolitionists faced that fateful day and the ones that followed until Harpers Ferry brought an end to the epic life of that mercurial man. Grady Atwater, site administrator of the John Brown Museum in the park explains the sequence of events in that life. A tall man in a home designed for the shorter men of that era, Atwater has to stoop as he leads interested guests around the cabin where John Brown lived part of his life in Kansas -- fighting against proslavery forces to keep the state a place for free men. He assumes unwittingly the posture depicted in the famous painting of John Brown on the mural at the State Capitol in Topeka.

Chanute comes next, population 9,000, its claim to fame the museum to Martin and Osa Johnson. Virtually unknown today, they were pioneer world adventure photographers – they wrote 18 books and 100 magazine articles, took 15,000 still pictures and shot a million feet of 35 mm film at a time before television. Martin was killed in a plane crash in 1937 and Osa, who lived in Chanute, died in 1953. The small museum now sits in a turn of the century Santa Fe depot that also housed a Harvey Girls restaurant. Says Conrad Froehlich, the museum director, “Visitors don’t find small museums intimidating or crowded. Interaction is easier and we have passionate staff members and volunteers whose stories help artifacts come alive to the visitor.”

Beyond Chanute lies Independence, Kansas -- and the Little House on the Prairie. Laura Ingalls, the author, wrote nine books that chronicled her pioneer life. She arrived in this area in 1869 and left a mere two years later but enthusiasts researched her books in depth to identify where those two years had been spent. The cabin was built in 1977 according to the description in her books. It has the two windows and even the china figurine, the Little Shepherdess as mentioned fondly by the author. “This cabin a goal destination for 30 countries,” says Amy Finney, its manager.

Another person who brought pleasure to the public, Emmett Kelly, has his museum further down the road lodged in the former opera house in Sedan, population 1300. Emmett’s father worked for the railroad there and moved to Missouri when Emmett was aged 7 but this king of clowns has always been important to his hometown. “He was an unhappy alcoholic crying on the inside but he made people laugh,” says Nita Jones, a local realtor who handles public relations for Sedan. The exhibits come from about a hundred items that belonged to Emmett Kelly, augmented by many private collections including more than 2,000 liquor decanters including two featuring Emmett. “Emmett got his start in show business by being a cartoonist,” says Nita holding up a school project clown figure Emmett had made as a small child.

Sedan has utilized the Wizard of Oz story to create a Yellow Brick Road of almost 12,000 bricks with costs borne by 28 foreign countries. The general store has Dorothy, Tin Man and Scarecrow figures in its corners. It also sells great ice cream.

For the night we stopped at the Beaumont Hotel, established 1879 in this little township of 59 people. Its present owner, Stephen Craig, also has the Radisson in Kansas City Kansas and, an aviation buff, he also owns a Beech Staggerwing and a P51 WW II fighter. Craig landed on the private strip outside the hotel once in 1970 and finally bought the hotel. Aircraft land on the airfield then trundle down the main street to reach the hotel. It’s clearly a love child to him; aviation posters and photographs hang all over the walls and the hotel still offers the rates that were in place in 2001 when he bought it. The 11-room hotel and restaurant is particularly busy at fly-in weekends when often there are more planes outside than cars as many as 40 planes parked outside on special weekends with pilots as far flung as California, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. “Sometimes you wonder where they’re coming from,” muses Debbie Morris, a waitress here for five years, then she answers her own thought: ”Wichita.”

Wichita with its flying history, aviation industries and its six or so airfields is quite close and that’s where we’re heading next. Wichita’s metropolitan area is the largest in Kansas and has almost one fifth of the state’s population. It has the living 1870’s history Old Cowtown Museum, a local attraction that spotlights Wichita’s cattle trail past. But it also has the magnificent new Museum of World Treasures, the museum itself being such a treasure. The museum has dinosaur skeletons, Egyptian mummies, Roman coins from the time of Herod, a 2^nd Century bust of Alexander the Great, a 16^th century letter from the British Queen Elizabeth, and handguns, bugles and spurs from the Battle of Gettysburg. That’s for starters.

If the Museum of World Treasures whetted our appetite we were on the right track with Hutchinson ahead. The Underground Salt Museum takes visitors (30 at a time so be sure to arrive with a reservation) 650 feet deep into the largest salt mine in North America. The mine is more than a museum. It’s a research location for scientists who have found living bacterial spores entrapped in ice crystals that were 275 million years old, from a time long before dinosaurs.

Science is also on show nearby at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, a museum displaying the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside the Russian Republic including the EKG of the first man in space, Cosmonaut Gagarin. Visitors don’t really expect to find this dramatic a museum in a small town of 40,000 right in the middle of a state more famous for its agriculture. The Cosmosphere is now affiliated with the Smithsonian.

It may have been a surprise to find a space story laid out for us in Hutchinson, but we already knew what was now ahead of us, the legendary American West: Dodge City.

This was of course the town of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday. Their folklore hangs over the town although the old town has essentially vanished, a victim of 1970s Urban Renewal, a government “benefit” that rival Tombstone, Arizona never had to endure. The historic buildings on Front Street were demolished in disgraceful disregard of the 1300 signatures of local citizens who pleaded for the wrecking not to take place. The political mistakes made by those in office haven’t ruined Dodge either as a destination or as a separate story so click here if you’d like to read our account of Dodge.

Salina with its slogan “Small Town America, Big Time Fun” was, like Hutchinson, a pleasant surprise. Its Rolling Hills Wildlife Adventure knocked us over with its large collection of full mount animal dioramas. The program started as a small zoo when a local rancher, Charlie Walker, started inviting local school children to his barn to see his private collection of wild animals then, like Mopsy, it just grew.. His collection was incorporated as a zoo in 1999. Then the question arose: what could it do to attract people in winter? The zoo then heard that 1,500 mounted animal exhibits had been put into storage by the World Wildlife Museum in Stockton, California when it closed. Those plus a gift from the Smithsonian created the potential for a year-round attraction and, in 2005, the zoo and the taxidermy pieces were opened to the public. As we’re from San Diego it takes a lot for any zoo to impress us but this display of mounted wild animals almost overwhelmed us.

The attraction in Abilene, Kansas was not wild animals but a former president, Dwight E. Eisenhower. Commented a 40 year-old man sitting across from us at our Victorian B & B in Abilene as we had breakfast, “We went to the museum yesterday. Gee, did you know that President Eisenhower had been the Supreme Commander of the forces in Europe in World War II?” As senior citizens with a longer memory we gulped and responded weakly and thought how transient is glory.

Abilene has a great small town feel. You can stand and look down the railway track and remember this was one of the great Kansas cowtowns, you can walk its wide streets and smile at the pixilated mural of Ike, you can eat in its family-style restaurants like the Brookville Hotel -- and feel you would like to live there and get to know those Kansas people. Abilene is a story within a story and if you’d like to read our separate account, click here.

Our drive had been planned for some time but over-organized trips can miss less known attractions. Still musing about the impact of the railroad and the cattle drives on Abilene we swung in, on impulse, to Fort Riley for its sense of history from pioneer days and its museum tributes to the US cavalry. The so-called Custer House, built of native limestone was formerly Quarters 24. It is now a museum to frontier life. Custer, the flamboyant and reckless officer who became a general within two years of his graduation from West Point, did live on the post nearby but that original house burned down.

We were too far away to get to Liberal, Kansas which capitalizes on the Oz story with its attraction, Dorothy’s house but, if we detoured again on our way to Topeka, we’d pass Wamego and its Oz museum. Why not? What is Kansas if not sunflowers by the wayside and tallgrass in the middle of the Flint Hills; Charlie Meade, retired deputy marshal of Dodge City still carrying a gun on the right side of the tracks and Dwight Eisenhower, the president born of parents on the other, the wrong side; and the story by L. Frank Baum that has charmed millions and millions? Oz Museum here we come.

Wamego lies about 12 miles above Interstate 70, an easy detour. The museum lies on the main street, Lincoln. Its exhibits are changing as owners end their loans but, to us, one point of interest was how the owner of some of the artifacts, Franciscan Friar Johnpaul Cafiero, former police officer now chaplain for the Illinois State Police, has used this collection and wisdom of Oz to mentor inner city kids in Chicago. He describes the witches and flying monkeys to them as the evils of drugs, gangs, poverty and violence; he suggests the Wizard of Oz is God who knows the way home; and the ruby slippers are the magic in their own hands. Powerful. The museum gets visitors from all over the world, of course, but a special visitor was Roger S. Baum, the great grandson of the author who signed the large figure of the Tin Man in the lobby. Baum, the author died in 1919 in his 60s having written 14 books about Oz. A woman wrote 19 more and another author seven for, in all, a total of 40 but nothing had the impact of the first book -- or as we headed for Topeka, the capital, the impact to us of the Tornado warning that had just been issued for our area, the northeast part of the state that day.

Topeka came up, a big city and a big hotel the Capitol Plaza offering, like all the places we’d stayed at in Kansas, free WiFi. The only hotel we’d stayed at in Missouri for a convention, the Hyatt Regency, charged (a lot) for WiFi raising the ire of one travel writer who asked us in the Hyatt, “Why is it the more expensive a hotel is the more they gouge you for extras?” We didn’t know but wondered if Kansas hotels not charging was more a characteristic of the state of Kansas itself.

Topeka was busy. The Combat Air Museum, tended to by volunteers made us wonder what will museums do in the future as their docents die off? Who will explain the past to tourists if none have interest or memory of it? The air museum, like many in Kansas and Kansas City Missouri, had informative and touching discussions on the wars of the 20^th century. The State Capitol was undergoing a restoration that will take five years so many of its famous murals were not exposed although Amelia Earhart was standing proudly in her alcove. The Kansas Museum of History was magnificent and exceeded our expectations. It had Native American history, exhibits from the Civil War and displays of Kansas families. It had cars, trains and Charlie Norton’s “The Hide Hunter” sculpture. Old Prairie Town similarly reminded us of the past from the 1800s country doctor’s office to the 1891 one-room school house where we got a geography lesson from the schoolteacher. We even got a lesson at dinner at the Civic Theater & Academy (founded in 1936 it’s the oldest continuously running community dinner theater in the country.) It was staging ”Outlaw” when we were there reminding us again of times when Kansas really was the Wild West.

Our last stop before Kansas City International airport was the Chateau Avalon, a 62-roomed B & B in Wyandotte County. It has 24 themes to dramatize romantic occasions but after driving around Kansas for two weeks we were looking more for space and a big meal. Fortunately The Legends at Village West was next door, a dining, entertainment and shopping extravaganza spread out over 400 acres. What choices! We could eat at the Saddle Ranch Chop House then ride its mechanical bull or be entertained while we dined at T-REX Cafe, a unique restaurant though one is coming to Orlando. Or we could stroll the area admiring the statues of legendary Kansas figures from which The Legends got its name such as Walter Chrysler and Clyde Cessna; Buster Keaton and Dwight Eisenhower (Ike fly fishing); Damon Runyon and, naturally, Wyatt Earp. And, barely noticed in a group of statues, Jim Ryun of Wichita, a hero to any schoolboy in 1964, the first high school athlete to break the 4-minute mile. He was a junior in high school!

The Legends and its legends were good memories to take away from Kansas. Those celebrity names but also memories of a contented people, proud of their history yet not inclined to boast about it. Restaurants and inns that didn’t gouge its customers. Museums pleased, some even thrilled, you cared to visit them. People who said “Excuse me” if you bumped into them. Good people.

What about Kansas City Missouri? Doesn’t it have museums?

Sure does and we squeezed in several. But we also made time to attend the impressive Starlight Theater for a performance of Les Miserables. This outdoor theater recreated in 2000 with its state of the art sound has to be the gold standard for such ventures. Starlight’s previous history goes back to a show put on, in the 1920s, for Queen Marie of Romania, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and includes performances from Jerry Lewis, Tony Bennett, Robert Goulet, Tommy Tune – and Harry Truman. Truman attended the opening of Mr. President in the 1960s but had to leave at the intermission with an attack of appendicitis.

The Truman Presidential Library is a short drive to the east in Independence, MO, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (with its badminton shuttlecock out in front and its impressive collections inside) is right there in downtown Kansas City Missouri – a comfortable drive because Kansas City is surely the easiest city to drive around in provided you don’t have to use the interstates that run through the city which are poorly lit and so badly and excessively signed they were surely designed by a madman.

The World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial was fascinating. As well as exhibits it ran two short documentaries on the Great War, with the one in particular that showed the factors leading up to the war absolutely spellbinding. Hallmark has an interesting and rather charming visitors center at Crown Center Complex and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum are nearby, the latter with an unexpected gem: a tribute to the great Ella Fitzgerald scribbled and signed by the equally great Picasso.