Travel Tips

I've got no room in my Kansas travelogues to share these photos from my April/May 2003 visit.

I spent much of my trip doing what I like to call a 'photo safari' (hiking around with my camera). This is on the Konza Prairie outside Manhattan at dusk, when I found fields full of deer and wild turkeys.

Please have a gander at any of my Kansas pages for more photos plus a good deal of writing on my home state.

I probably stopped to photograph every barn I saw! This one is on Lower Mcdowell Road, south on Manhattan on the way to Alma. Most any back road detour in the state will dispel any notion that Kansas is flat or featureless.

Kansans are a race of people who can smell the approach of rain, who know it will storm by nightfall when looking at a sunrise, who can feel a tornado twisting a county away...

It so true that you don't appreciate what you had growing up until you leave. Independence, Kansas is just about the nicest small town in America!

Independence has a handsome and lively downtown...fantastic park and zoo...interesting museums...is 10 miles from the site of Little House on the Prairie...and all of this is surrounded by wooded hills and lakes that look like the Ozarks!

Sunsets in Kansas explode like silent volcanoes.

These telephone poles took on added poignancy after visiting a nearby pioneer graveyard where smaller, identical crossesmade of iron pipes stood amid the short grass.

This stunning monument on the Lake Wilson shoreline is accessible only by boat or after a long hike, much like the rock formations you see in Utah or Arizona.

Older locals remember the days when this was a complete stone arch.

This barn means a lot to me...I grew up in the farmhouse on the same hillside and spent my summers jumping among the hay bales like it was my personal grassy gymnasium.

I took this photo by accident but on developing it was struck by how much it seemed like an old-fashioned photograph, as if I'd taken it as a kid with my Brownie camera!