The State Fair in Hutchinson is our annual gathering, complete with sculptures made from butter and innovative fried food (pickles and Snickers, for example). This is the one to celebrate the rural roots and current economy of the state.
The Smoky Hill River Festival in Salina is one of the longest-running art, craft and performance festivals in the state, with a fine variety of music, food and artisans.
Best legend - true or not
It is said that Kansas was settled primarily in the cause of abolition, and that abolitionists like John Brown were all armed with a Sharp's rifle in one hand, a Bible in the other. Our Beecher Bible & Rifle Church in Wabaunsee (the name of both the town and county) is one place known to have taken shipment of a crate containing both Bibles and rifles.
Three must-see places
The Konza Prairie, near Manhattan. This preserve of native prairie grass in the mostly treeless Kansas Flint Hills is one of our most spectacular landscapes, complete with soaring hawks, a herd of buffalo, grasses and prairie flowers, and sky, sky, sky.
The Garden of Eden and Grassroots Art Museum, Lucas. Samuel P. Dinsmoore built from locally quarried limestone his stone log cabin, then proceeded to surround it with concrete sculptures from the Bible - Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel - as well as political commentary. Dinsmoore himself is buried in a concrete crypt and can be viewed by the hardy for a small fee, though he's been dead for almost 70 years. Nearby is the Kansas Grassroots Art Association's museum.
Lindsborg is a community so Swedish that when the king of Sweden visited it 40 years after its founding, he remarked: "Lindsborg is more Swedish than Sweden." Full of interesting shops, with bed and breakfasts, restaurants and museums (including a great small art museum at Bethany College), Lindsborg makes a fine destination.
Three places to avoid
Interstate 70, which one magazine once called the most boring car trip in the United States. Well, what do you expect from road builders most interested in level terrain and the fewest number of bridges to build? Once off I-70, the traveler finds the nuances Kansas has to offer.
Casinos, which have become a growth industry in Kansas, as in many places, but once you have been in one, you've been in them all, and they drain the brain as well as the pocketbook.
Rivers, which should be part of the natural beauty of Kansas, almost never are. Our rivers tend to be wide and shallow, with lots of sandbars. The Arkansas River, west of Wichita, is often waterless. Our waterways also tend to be privately owned. Our rivers need a huge effort to turn them into public spaces of beauty and quiet, wildlife and recreation.
Best place to taste regional cooking
The Brookville Hotel in Abilene is famous for its fried chicken, served family-style with all the trimmings. But most Kansas towns also boast a Mexican restaurant or two well worth trying, as Kansas has had a significant Mexican population for much of its existence.
A famous native son or daughter
Dr. Samuel Jay Crumbine isn't as famous as he should be, but he made Kansas the leader in public health during his tenure as secretary of the State Board of Health, 1904-1923. Just as the germ theory took hold in medicine, Crumbine found creative and energetic ways to alert Kansas and the United States to the dangers of contagion as represented by the common drinking cup, the roller towel, the unchanged bed sheet, the rat, public spitting and the housefly. Because of his efforts to rid Kansas of flies, a Boy Scout troop screening windows in Weir City first used screen scraps, tacked to yard sticks, to produce the "fly bat." Crumbine renamed it the flyswatter. We should probably be known as "The Flyswatter State."
A major problem residents face
The image problem, one that starts with the Kansas association with The Wizard of Oz. The stereotype of black-and-white rural people wishing they were somewhere else - perhaps "over the rainbow" - haunts the popular culture. Because of the association, Kansas tends to get more national press for its eccentricities about religious fervor or evolution or hypocrisy than do states with similar problems (which must include most states).
The best joke that locals tell on themselves - or on their rival state
Since it's not funny, the weather is one of our good subjects for humor:
There were three Kansans who had grown up together, but only one of them still lived in Kansas, farming into his old age just as his father and grandfather had done.
The two others had moved away, one to Colorado and the other to California.
As death approached them, they decided on a reunion, at which they decided to just go ahead and be cremated together.
After eight hours in the crematorium furnace, there was nothing left of the Coloradan. By half a day, the Californian was burnt to a crisp. But on the third day, when the oven door was opened, the Kansan sat up and stretched.
"Another day of this good heat," he said, "and we'll harvest the wheat."
