Ahhhhhhh, beautiful Kansas!
Written: Dec 20 '00 (Updated Dec 20 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Kansas is beautiful.
Cons: Fred Phelps
|
|
|
| skippio's Full Review: Kansas |
Kansas is misunderstood.
Most people seem to hate Kansas, but they are just missing the whole point. Kansas is not a place of high society, swinging nightlife, or for hob-knobbing with the cultural elite (unless of course you run into Bob Dole). If you’re looking for those things in Kansas in the first place, well, there’s something horribly wrong with you. Kansas knows it doesn’t exactly have any high culture, tourist traps or anything else that most people associate with a worthy vacation destination, and yet, Kansas doesn’t care. And dang it, we just find something awfully charming about that.
The best time to see Kansas is in June and July. At this time the fields are at their greenest, the sky is at its bluest, and the sunflowers are at their sunniest. As you drive across the plains on a straight, flat two lane highway with those wondrous, softly-undulating fields spreading out for miles on all sides, the only other things you are likely to see on the horizon are grain elevators. The size of a town is in direct proportion to the size and number of grain elevators there. A one-elevator town might be only a crossroads with a gas station and a post office. A four-elevator town will have the aforementioned, plus maybe a restaurant or two and a motel. You can just imagine the good times to be had in a ten elevator town.
Following is a compilation of some interesting experiences we’ve had in Kansas. Hopefully, on your next trip there, you will have as much fun as we do every time we visit.
Great Bend We stayed here for a night in a small, independent motel. The proprietor was a burly fellow with lots of chest hair peeking out over the collar of his shirt. We asked him where we could get some Italian food in town. He said, “Italian food? I don’t eat that stuff. What’s wrong with good old American food?” (That last sentence quickly became a catchphrase here at the Skippio household.) We also asked him if there were any sights to see in Great Bend. He told us there was a scenic overlook south of town, but when most people go up there they come back disappointed. There’s just not much to see except more of Kansas.
Just outside of Great Bend is a big swamp called Cheyenne Bottoms. Thousands upon thousands of birds call Cheyenne Bottoms home, even some sea birds that are rarely seen inland. Duck hunters from all over the country come here to hunt in the fall.
We did eventually find an Italian place in Great Bend – Pastoli’s, which served up some of the finest pizza in recent memory. (A lot better than Cici’s.) Pastoli’s also had a monstrous salad bar and pasta buffet.
Lucas, Home of the famous Garden of Eden. What? You mean you’ve never heard of the Garden of Eden at Lucas, Kansas? Well, you’re in for a treat. At the Garden of Eden, a crazy fellow with an unhealthy concrete obsession created a collection of Biblical/social/political figures around his home in the middle of this small town. They are not artful creations, but they’re not meant to be art. It’s more like one man’s rant against society, an editorial set in concrete. For a small fee, you can have a guided tour of the grounds and explore it for yourself. It’s an interesting slice of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century history, so brush up on your trusts, monopolies and general American economic history before you visit. And you can even meet the fellow face-to-face who created it all – he’s dead, but that’s okay, he doesn’t smell too much.
Schoenchen A tiny hamlet directly south of the booming metropolis of Hays, Schoenchen is so small it doesn’t even have a grain elevator. Schoenchen consists of a Catholic church, a playground, an old WPA school building, and about thirty modest, well-kept houses. We stopped there to metal-detect at the school, which is no longer used as a school, because the town does not have enough kids for a school. (They just go to school at Hays.) We ran into a kid of about eight or nine on a bike who was out for a ride around town, looking for some trouble to get into. He said the last store in Schoenchen closed a couple years ago, because people just use the Wal-Mart up in Hays. We asked what he did for fun there in the summertime. “Sweat,” he said. The kid said he wanted to join the Navy when he was older.
We feel sorry for Schoenchen. In twenty or thirty years, it won’t exist any more; it will shrivel up and quietly die. The land will be bought up, unceremoniously plowed under, and in place of Schoenchen a field of Frankencorn will appear. No one will be any the wiser.
Abilene, the birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Everything in town is named either “Eisenhower” or “Presidential” something or other. An old stop on the Chisholm trail, Abilene is proud to flaunt its wild west history, with a re-constructed “Old Abilene Town” and hosting popular rodeos several times a year. Abilene is a fairly well-rounded town. Along with this, it also home to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Greyhound Hall of Fame (dogs, not buses), the Russell Stover Candy factory outlet, and the Museum of Independent Telephony. You can’t find entertainment like that in New York City.
These are just a few of the towns we’ve visited in Kansas. We will readily admit that there’s not a whole heck of a lot out there; but, what is there, we feel, is worth seeing. It’s an American experience, one that doesn’t translate well into words, but is a feeling that cannot be forgotten. No place that we know of truly exemplifies the spirit of America -- the true spirit, not the cheap, disposable America that we are so familiar with these days. But to find this, you will have to take your car off the Interstate and bump down those uncivilized, two-lane state highways. But you're not in that much of a hurry anyhow, are you? Pull off on a side road. Go ahead, get out of your car. Look out across the fields, feel that constant breeze wafting across your face, and in the distance you can visualize the covered wagons coming across the prairie full of people looking for a better life. Yeah, that's Kansas.
Kansans, for the most part, simply do not have time to worry about what the rest of the country thinks of their state. They are just too busy being Kansans, and trying to grow enough corn, wheat, and sunflowers to pay their bills – corn, wheat, and sunflowers, by the way, that feed the rest of the country, so you better dang well appreciate it, because without Kansas and its hardworking residents you would not be able to enjoy that body-building Wonder Bread every day.
As we were driving out of Schoenchen, we happened to catch this phrase in the AAA Tourbook:
“Constant winds stir much more than fields of grain and flowers. They blow in ideas, visions and dreams.”
For that nine-year-old in Schoenchen, his dream and vision was to get the heck out of Kansas. But our best guess is that once he’s been in the Navy a few years, he’ll want to come back to Kansas, to that beautiful little hamlet nestled in the fields. Because there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
skippio
|
|
Member: W. Fritz
Location: Newton, Iowa
Reviews written: 44
Trusted by: 109 members
About Me:
Winners of Fitter Families, Best Couple, Texas State Fair, 1926. We haven't aged much.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.