While Wichita’s Old Cowtown Museum brings the city’s heyday back to life, Dr Jon and Lorna Kardatzke’s Museum of World Treasures (www. worldtreasures.org) offers an unusually diverse collection of documents and art treasures from all over the world.


Tourist attractions


Visitors are drawn to Hutchinson in the Northwest by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (www.cosmo.org) a space museum which was created as a private planetarium and now collaborates with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Historical events and personalities from before the start of the space age until the end of the Apollo mission can be explored. “Hutch” is also known as the “Salt Capital”. In the Kansas Underground Salt Museum (www.undergroundmuseum.org) visitors descend almost 400m below ground into a salt mine. It is a huge salt dome quarried mainly for road salt. Important documents, fi lm reels from Hollywood and treasures from all over the world have also been stored in the parts of the mine that have already been excavated.


Lindsborg was founded by Swedish immigrants (www.lindsborg.org). The local artist Birger Sandzén (1871 - 1954) is commemorated not only in the Birger Sandzén Memorial Art Gallery, but also in the Mingenback Art Center in Bethany College. With numerous art galleries, including the Red Barn Studio Museum, which is dedicated to the local artist Lester Rayme, the Small World Gallery, the Courtyard Gallery and the Oil Springs Schoolhouse Gallery, the town is today considered an artists’ colony.


Nearby Lucas numbers only a few hundred inhabitants, but is known in the art world as the “Grassroots Arts Capital”. The Grassroots Art Center of America, a museum for folk art (www.grassrootsart.net) and the Garden of Eden, a house converted into a art installation by Sam Dinsmoor by 1933 (www.garden-of-eden-lucas-kansas.com) offer insight. The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction and Museum (www.worldslargestthings.com) is a folk art collection belonging to local artist Erika Nelson and can be admired in a small minibus which travels around the country.


Lucas is easily reached from Salina, the county seat and centre of the world’s largest wheat-growing area. Wheat, ok – but vineyards? There are now over 20 vineyards in each of Kansas and Oklahoma offering good wines (www.kansasfarmwineries.com). There are also wine trails, such as the Northeast Kansas Wine Trail and wine festivals.


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