About Us

Welcome to Kansas Travel Adventures, your go-to guide for exploring the Sunflower State like never before. You’ll want to know a little bit about us.

We’re Doug and Randee, Kansas adventurers. Doug is a native Kansan and Randee is a long-time resident. Together we have a passion for hidden gems, quirky roadside stops, and wide open spaces, We’ve made it our mission to uncover the best that Kansas has to offer and to help you do the same.

Whether you’re a weekend wanderer or a road trip enthusiast, you’ll find detailed guides, honest reviews, and insider tips that only a local could provide.

Why We Started This Blog

After years of exploring small towns, scenic byways, and state parks across Kansas, we realized how little coverage our beautiful state gets in mainstream travel media. We wanted to help with that. We would like this blog to became a resource for fellow Kansans and travelers alike looking for authentic, experience-based travel advice.

Our goal is simple: to make it easier for you to fall in love with Kansas — one small-town bakery or offbeat museum at a time.

Why Trust us and our blog?

• Local Expertise: We’ve spent decades living and traveling in Kansas, by ourselves, together, and with family members. We won’t give generic content copied from other online sources.
• Real Adventures: Every article is based on our experience. We do the things and go to the places that we write about.
• Honest Reviews: We’ll let you know what’s worth stopping for and why. We won’t hype anything we didn’t love doing.

What to expect on our Kansas Travel Adventures blog

We love our home state of Kansas and hope to help others find the fun and exciting things there are to do and see here.  It’s a big state with widely varying geography, history, and activities.  Hopefully, we’ll help you spend your time in Kansas in ways that satisfy your travel or adventures wishes. From the space-age adventures at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson to Boot Hill in Dodge City, Kansas has a little bit of everything. Because the state is so large, it’s helpful to have some guidance to find all the interesting things to do from people who know it well.

We’re going to share all the information we can to help you find the most interesting and exciting things to do in Kansas and share detailed information to help make your travel adventures smooth and easy.  We’ve had those “I don’t know where to park” or “Why isn’t this open today?” experiences and will help you avoid them. Want to know if the Brown Mansion in Coffeyville is worth your time to stop and take a tour? We’ll help you with that. Spending some time in southeast Kansas and looking for a good place to fish? We’ll help you with that.

What you can expect from Kansas

Kansas has some truly amazing history. The whole “Bleeding Kansas” era and John Brown stories make it a draw for Civil War historians. Literary icons such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Damon Runyun and Rex Stout have roots in Kansas. As an literature professor, those are quite interesting to me and probably will be to some of you. The Wild West history, both with outlaws and with cattle drives brings America’s colorful past into focus. The Gunsmoke Trail is well worth exploring! We’ll definitely highlight Kansas historical sites.

We are excited to visit and share the varied landscapes as well. It’s not all just flat plains! Southeast Kansas is rolling hills, rivers, and trees. Western Kansas is flat plains interrupted with cool rock formations such as Castle Rock. In between are the Flint Hills and one of the last places in America to see native tall grass prairie. Many of the pictures we’ve taken cause our non-Kansas friends to say, “That doesn’t look like Kansas!” If outdoor adventures are what you are looking for, Kansas has them.

Good food is always high on the list as we explore and we’ll share all that with you! We’re always excited to try new things from fine dining to home cooking. Kansas cuisine has the many of the delicious aspects of southern cooking, but with it’s own special flair. You’re not going to get better beef than what we raise in Kansas.

We’ll help you find great things to do whether you are here for a full vacation or just here for a few days and need a few interesting things to do.  Maybe you are just driving through on I-70 and want to get out of the car for a bit.  We’ll cover the 1-70 corridor with interesting places to stop. We’ve traveled with both kids and older people who have mobility issues, so those are areas we’ll address as well. 

Why are we sold on Kansas

Doug grew up in Kansas, living in several small towns all over western Kansas.  His father was a highway engineer, so driving the roads is what he did.  HIs family has lived in Kansas for several generations and centered around Medicine Lodge in south-central Kansas. Medicine Lodge is the home of the Medicine Lodge Peace Treaty Pageant which was always a great time for his family to have family get togethers, reliving an importnat part of Kansas history. After graduating from high school in Garden City, he left for a number of years for college and various jobs.

Feeling the need to come back closer to our parents, we moved to Parsons, KS in southeast Kansas in 2006, and I started getting to know the state.  We’ve spent 18 years visiting different areas of the state from Hutchinson, where our kids went to Space Camp at the Cosmosphere, to Castle Rock on our way over to Denver, to Big Brutus which is the largest electric steam shovel still in existence, just a few miles from our home, and everywhere else we could get to.  

We love to take road trips and right now we are driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Some of our trips will include some kids and grandkids, some will include my mom, who has mobility issues, and some might include friends. We’ll do some camping, though we’ll mainly try to find places to stay with some history or some interesting features. We do tend to stay in Holiday Inns if we are choosing a chain hotel because we just haven’t had a bad experience with them. We plan to provide as much detailed information on all the places we stay and things we see as we can to help fellow travelers have a smooth experience.

We’ll do a LOT of day trips, but as many overnight trips as we can fit into our schedule. Planning our next trip is one of my favorite pastimes!

A bit more about us

Doug works full time as a minister and adjuncts at Labette Community College where I am a full-time English professor. These jobs shape the time we have to travel, but we’re on the road every chance we get. We’ve traveled extensively in the US, a bit in Canada, and some great destinations in Europe, including France, Switzerland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria. Everywhere we go we find beautiful scenary, friendly people, and fun things to do.

If you have thoughts on Kansas adventures we shouldn’t miss or want to know more about somewhere we’ve been drop us a note at Kansas Travel Adventures.

Pick a Kansas Destination close to you and start exploring! I hope we’ll see you on one of the many scenic roads in Kansas!