Next year’s Great Kansas Road Trip will let you explore rural areas

The Kansas Sampler Festival is history now, and in its place next year will be a road trip of gigantic proportions.

Welcome to the Great Kansas Road Trip, a festival that annually will encourage Kansans to travel the first full weekend in May to a certain region of the state.

Next year’s festival will highlight Barber, Kiowa and Comanche counties.

“We chose those counties because we wanted the first road trip to be close to a populated area like Wichita – close enough but not too far away,” said Marci Penner, executive director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation near Inman, which will serve each year as the umbrella organization that oversees the next year’s road trip.

According to Penner, the road trip is to get people hooked on seeing the 83,000 miles of Kansas by modeling how to explore the state – providing places to see and things to do and getting Kansans onto back roads where they can eat in local cafes, talk, shop and get to know the locals.

“We will descend on these three counties on the same weekend and all that is required of these towns is to be the best they can be at being themselves,” she said.

Small-town life

Some of those places next May will include the town of Wilmore.

Located in Comanche County, which is on the Kansas-Oklahoma state line, the area is best known for big ranches and hunting. Tree-lined dirt streets run through Wilmore, population 53, which is about 125 miles southwest of Wichita. In Wilmore, Ernie Griffin put together an Italian carousel he bought online.

“We didn’t have instructions, except for: ‘Put up the center post, assemble the top, assemble the lower portion.’ Literally, those were the instructions for hundreds of parts,” Griffin told The Eagle in June 2015.

At the carousel’s official grand opening in June 2013, more than 150 people showed up. But the Griffins discovered they didn’t have enough electricity to power the huge carousel, which features 688 lights.

So residents hand-pushed the carousel to turn it. A few months later, the carousel was properly wired and ready for service.

The carousel has continued turning whenever the Griffins are home. All visitors have to do is honk, and if the Griffins are home, they will come out and fire up the ride.

Other communities will include Greensburg, which this month is marking the 10-year anniversary of a devastating tornado that leveled most of the town. Kansas road trippers can see firsthand how the community put the green back in Greensburg and rebuilt.

Travelers can also see where wind-whipped wildfires burned areas in Barber and Comanche counties and how quickly the prairie has come back. Visitors to the three counties can also pull over to have a beer at Buster’s in Sun City, visit Carry Nation’s house in Medicine Lodge or have pie in any one of the local cafes in the three chosen counties.

There will be opportunities to see buffalo from dirt roads in Barber County and view cotton and canola as well as ripening wheat fields.

‘Why you drive over cattle guards’

“So the whole idea is to help people – help all Kansans see what it is like in rural Kansas,” Penner said. “We want them to get to know people and develop relationships and begin to understand why not every road in Kansas is paved and why you drive over cattle guards. It is a wonderful opportunity to understand traditions and lifestyles.”

Sunday was the last day for the Kansas Sampler Festival, held this year at Winfield’s Island Park.

The festival, which ran for 28 years, was billed as the largest outdoor travel show in Kansas. More than 8,300 people attended this past weekend’s festival. Like its predecessor, the Great Kansas Road Trip will be all about what Kansans and their friends can see, do, hear, taste, buy and learn in Kansas.

But skip the brochures.

“So the idea is instead of everybody coming together to go booth to booth, they will be eating at cafes, shopping in stores and driving the scenic roads,” Penner said.

This story was originally published May 7, 2017 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Next year’s Great Kansas Road Trip will let you explore rural areas."