Road trip through KANSAS (Our 42nd state!) | Kansas City BBQ, unique sights, Wichita, & MORE!

If you missed our last video we're exploring some brand new states for us on our way back down to Texas. We just spent five amazing days road tripping around Nebraska which was full of super cool spots and experiences and for the next few days we're going to be road tripping around Kansas and first up we're in Kansas City. Kansas City, Kansas is located right on the Kansas Missouri border right across from Kansas City, Missouri and despite having the same name they are two completely different cities. Back in the 1830s a riverboat landing was founded on the Missouri side and was named the city of Kansas and later changed its name to Kansas City in 1889. The name comes from the Kansas River which gets its name from the Ka Nation Native Americans also known as the Kanza people. In 1872 the town on the Kansas side was named Kansas City to try to capitalize and benefit from all the growth on the Missouri side and the Kansas politicians even tried to make the Missouri Kansas City part of Kansas but they said a big nope and the two different Kansas cities remained. While Kansas City, Missouri might be the more well known of the two cities today we're on the Kansas side for one very important activity and if you know us you already know what we're going to be doing we got to get some Kansas City barbecue. As many of you know we are huge barbecue fans we even named our van brisket after our favorite kind of barbecue and lucky for us Kansas City is famous for barbecue. There are tons of places both in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas that are said to have amazing barbecue and many opinions on which is the best but we came to a very popular spot on the Kansas side called Joe's Kansas City Barbecue which is located in an old gas station. Across the U.S. you can find all different styles of barbecue and in Kansas City the sauce is thick sweet and tangy and unlike some areas that specialize in one kind of meat they cook all the traditional cuts of meat here with one being especially popular burnt ends so we obviously had to get a lot of those. Burnt ends are cubes of beef that are cut from the point of the cooked brisket and these little delicious fatty morsels are like meat candy. We've had burnt ends before but we've never had Kansas City burnt ends so we can't wait to see how these stack up. These delicious little bites of heaven are so smoky so fatty and so tender. Just look how fatty this is. I love my brisket. Extra fatty or as we call in Texas nice and moist. This looks good. We also got an iconic item here the Z-Man sandwich. It's smoked provolone cheese topped with two crispy onion rings. It usually has brisket but I took mine to the next level and got burnt ends on there baby. Oh heck yeah. This sandwich is off the charts. I already explained how good these burnt ends are and there are so many of them in there. The cheese gives it a little creaminess. The sweet and tangy barbecue sauce. This bun as you already know it's pillowy and then that onion ring on there is so crispy. So good. Just gives it a nice texture crunch. We also got some ribs because you gotta try out ribs when you go to a barbecue place. There's a little bit of sauce on them but not too much. They look good. They come right off the bone. Nice little smoke ring on there a little pink on the edges. Super smoky, super tender and like Catherine said the perfect amount of barbecue sauce on there. Nice little glazing there. We originally had this huge week-long road trip planned all around Kansas including spending more time here in Kansas City but unfortunately we just have a lot on our plates right now and behind the scenes we've been very stressed and overwhelmed just trying to juggle filming, editing, and some time sensitive work projects. So we did have to cut quite a few things here in Kansas but we still have tons of fun stops planned and tomorrow we're going to hit the road to explore more of the state. We're currently driving through Topeka which is the capital of Kansas and we had originally planned to stop here to check out a few things but today's Sunday and everything we wanted to check out is closed. We're going to keep on driving and now we're off to see the wizard. One of the top things we think of when we think of Kansas is the Wizard of Oz and here in the small town of Wamego in northeast Kansas is the Oz Museum. It costs ten dollars per person and showcases over a hundred years of Oz memorabilia and it should be pretty awesome. Gotta get the Dorothy experience see what it's like to fly to Oz. Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. So a little bit of history on the Wizard of Oz. It was first a book called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum and released in 1900. It was then turned into a Broadway show in 1903 before the now famous film was released in 1939. Although the movie takes place in Kansas they never really say where in Kansas Dorothy is from but a town called Liberal Kansas has kind of deemed itself as Dorothy's hometown and they even have an old farmhouse that you can tour that's Dorothy's house and the town of Wamego has also really leaned into the Oz theme. They have this Oz Museum, they have an Oz winery, they have a yellow brick road, and they have a bunch of decorated Toto statues around town. There's all kinds of facts scattered through the museum and maybe the most impressive is that the film The Wizard of Oz is the most viewed film in the entire world with over 1 billion people watching the movie. Last night we watched The Wizard of Oz for probably the first time in 20 years just so we could especially appreciate this museum but if you don't have time to watch it before you come here they actually have a theater and you can watch the whole thing it just plays on loop over and over and over. This museum was a ton of fun to explore. There are so many cool things to see and learn but there's no place like home. There's no place like home. Normally when traveling outside of the western part of the U.S. our only options for free camping are parking lots but here in Kansas they have a pretty awesome free camping option. Fishing lakes. There are 46 fishing lakes in the state and 39 of them offer free camping and tonight we're staying at Potawatomi Lake near Manhattan, Kansas. It's primitive camping so there are no hookups or anything but there is a pit toilet and each site has a picnic table and a fire ring plus you get to camp on this lake which is way more beautiful and way more peaceful than sleeping in a Walmart parking lot. We've traveled pretty far and wide now in the U.S. and we've tried some pretty unique and delicious food combinations but we just recently stumbled upon maybe the most interesting one we have ever heard of. Chili and cinnamon rolls. So there's a couple theories on how this originated. One theory says it started in logging camps so loggers needed a high calorie meal for their long work day ahead of them. The other theory is it started in the 40s in school cafeterias after the creation and the mandate of the USDA National School Lunch Program. We first learned about this combination when researching iconic foods to have in Kansas but we've since learned that it is popular in other Midwest states as well as other states in the U.S. but we had never heard about it before coming to Kansas so Kansas is where we're gonna try it. All right and now for the moment of truth, how the heck does this taste together? So we had heard there are multiple ways you can eat this. Some people dip their cinnamon roll in it, some people just kind of scoop it, some people just eat some chili then eat some cinnamon roll. As you can see I just went full on and put the cinnamon roll in there so I think I'm just gonna... I don't know. I think... oh no this is... I either made this cinnamon roll taste better or I just ruined it by doing this. Let's go for it. Yeah that's pretty good. It's kind of just like having bread with your chili but it's sweeter. It kind of has like that sweet and spicy vibe going for it. Yeah this is actually a very unexpectedly good combination. Got me a good chunk of cinnamon roll. Dip and dunk. Maybe a little scoopage. I like that. That's actually a pretty good combo. I can definitely see. I picture like a sixth grade Adam at school in the cafeteria. Like I don't want this chili. Cinnamon roll sounds all right. I don't want to be here. I'm just gonna dip them and mix them together and it'll just... maybe it'll taste good. I can definitely see myself doing that. So going into this I thought this was gonna be pretty weird. So once we turned the camera off I was gonna just eat the cinnamon roll as a dessert but now after tasting it it's actually pretty good. I'm gonna keep dipping it and keeping it like this. I like it. This morning we drove just under an hour and a half south to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. This preserve protects 11,000 acres of prairie land and many years ago there were 170 million acres of prairie in North America stretching from Indiana to Kansas and from Canada to Texas. And within a generation most of it had been transformed into farmland and lost. Today only four percent of prairie land remain with most of it here in the Kansas Flint Hills. This prairie grass grows all year long and its height depends on the amount of rainfall it gets. It can be as little as six inches in the spring and then as you can see right now it's pretty tall. It's probably three, three and a half feet or so and this is the time of the year where it's its tallest. Around September and October it grows to its maximum height and it turns a golden brown and they call this time of year tall in the fall. We'll use Adam as our yardstick. Yeah I'm six foot it's probably five feet. Wow from six inches to five feet. Good job buddy. Besides just admiring the prairie there are a couple other things you can do here. There's an old ranch that you can explore which is super neat and there are a bunch of bison that live here and that's what we're after. We're on the hunt to find some bison. Multiple groups of bison out there. You probably can't see them. They're very very tiny specks but there's probably at least 50 bison just roaming all through the prairie grazing. Similar to how much the prairie has decreased in North America so has the amount of bison. There were up to 30 to 60 million bison grazing North America many years ago however in the 1800s the U.S. Army launched a mass killing of bison in order to control the Native Americans who relied on bison as a food source. They were also killed for their hides which were valuable and also to eliminate the threat of collision with the increase in railroads. By 1884 only 325 wild bison remained in the U.S. Today there are over 500,000 bison in the U.S. and the tall grass plains is home to some of the 11,000 prairie bison in the U.S. We are back on the road and we have a little over an hour drive to our next stop in Kansas or is it Kansas? Welcome in to Lindsborg also known as little Sweden USA. This town gets its nickname because it was settled in the 1860s by a group of Swedish immigrants from the Varmland province and today boasts a rich Swedish heritage with almost half the town's residents having Swedish ancestors. We just grabbed some coffee from blacksmith coffee shop and roastery which is located in an old blacksmith shop that happens to be the oldest standing building here in Lindsborg going back to 1874. It is such a cool building on the exterior as well as inside and I got me the ember latte which has a maple bourbon syrup cinnamon and cayenne should be a nice sweet and spicy mix just like our cinnamon it's just like the cinnamon roll and the chili but in a coffee. Oh yep I feel it I feel that cayenne oh yeah that's good. And I got myself what they call the caramel macchiacchi and I asked him what that is and he said it's basically like a caramel macchiato at Starbucks. Yeah that's super good. Oh yeah. As you wander around Lindsborg you'll notice these decorated horses which are called Dala horses which originated from the Dalarna province in Sweden. They're traditionally wooden carved horses that are decorated and used as toys for kids but in 2000 Lindsborg decided to create the nation's only herd of wild Dala horses. These are much bigger than traditional Dala horses and are made out of fiberglass and each are sponsored and uniquely decorated by different local artists often with the theme relating to the location that they sit. There's also an amazing gift shop in town called Hems Lloyd which has Scandinavian gifts and they have a workshop where they make Dala horses. If you catch them before 11 a.m you'll have a really good chance of seeing them make one but if not you can still kind of see their workspace and it's really really cool. While we were in town a local told us to check out the old mill which is a mill that operated from 1898 to 1955 and turned wheat into flour. It's now a museum that costs five dollars per person and has exhibits not only about wheat but also about the area and its heritage, some old buildings to check out and you actually get to go inside the mill. The Smoky Valley Roller Mill wasn't a grist mill but rather a roller mill that used a series of corrugated steel rollers to grind grain into flour. Four to six people operated the mill to process 30 to 35 bushels of wheat per hour yielding between 1,260 and 1,470 pounds of flour. This mill is an insane contraption. There are so many moving parts and it's pretty crazy that they let you just wander around in here. It's not operating right now but they do run it one day out of the year sometime in May which would be so cool to see. So if you're visiting Kansas in May you have to try to come here on the day it's operating because I would just love to see how all of these parts work together. That was an amazing unplanned stop. A huge thank you to the woman in town who told us to come here. Unfortunately we got here an hour before they closed so we kind of had to rush through it a bit but we highly recommend coming to check out this museum. That mill was so cool inside. Just a few miles outside Lindsborg is the Coronado Heights Castle which was built during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration. It's a castle-like building made of native sandstone and sits on a hill with nice views of the surrounding Smoky Hill River Valley and it's named after the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado who visited Kansas in 1541 looking for the Native American community of Kivita and the seven cities of gold and it's believed that he and his men viewed the prairie from this lookout point. Hear thee, hear thee, I present to you the queen of adventures of A plus K. Tonight we're staying in Hutchinson at our first harvest host here in Kansas, Stratica which is an underground salt mine museum and tomorrow we've got tickets to go check it out. There are 16 salt mines in the United States and a handful of them are here in Kansas. Millions of years ago Kansas was covered by the salt waters of an inland sea and as the waters evaporated the salt remained and was covered by earth and rock until the weight and pressure of the earth compressed it into a solid rock called halite. This halite is located between 500 and 1,000 feet below the surface and today we're going to be taking a hoist 600 feet underground as well as take a tram through some tunnels to learn all about salt mining. So we are heading down 650 feet the ride's going to take about 90 seconds. A couple things that are going to happen it is going to get completely dark. 650 feet is 20 feet taller than the St. Louis arch or it is about two statue of liberties stacked on top of each other. After you get off the hoist the first part of the tour is a self-guided area where you learn all about the rock and then you come around the corner here and they have all this equipment here that tells you more about how they actually mine all the salt. The salt from this mine is rock salt which is used to salt roads and there are four main steps to mine for rock salt. Starting with undercutting which is when they create a gash in the salt wall to make blasting more efficient. Then drills are used to create holes in the wall where explosives will be placed. Once the wall is blasted the salt rubble is loaded and crushed before being transported to the surface. What's crazy as we walk around this museum is that the ceiling and the walls are made of salt and before you ask no you cannot lick the walls. The floors are also made out of salt too. It's a cement made out of salt. So we're basically standing in the exact kind of area that people actually mine in. Surrounded by the kind of walls that they blast from. Salt mines also provide the perfect environment to keep and preserve important documents and artifacts. There's all kinds of cool stuff down here like old movie reels. There's newspaper printings from 1865 when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and there's a bunch of authentic costumes from Batman and Superman. This Mr. Freeze costume was worn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Batman and Robin movie in 1997. All right now it's time for the part we are most excited about the train ride and the tram ride. During the train ride we got to see more of the inner workings of the mine like a bulkhead which is a wall used to direct airflow, areas where the salt ceiling has fallen from the mud layer above, and also leftover trash from miners about 70 years ago. I feel like a salt miner right now. It's so dark down here. The ceilings are so low. There's no one else around besides us. It's so quiet. This is wild. We then hopped onto the tram ride where our amazing guide Galen took us through more tunnels and gave us tons of insight into the process of mining. It's all mined in what's called the room and pillar method of mining and you can see the pillars that are left in place and that's obviously good salt. It's there to hold up the ceiling. We don't have any other supports, wooden beams, steel beams holding up the ceiling. It's all done with the pillars of salt left in place and so what the miners would do, they would mine. This was called an entryway because it was entering towards the face of the mine. That's where they were mining and after they had done several of these entryways then they would come do the cross cuts and that's how they created the rooms leaving the pillars of salt in place. And you can see a little bit of impurities mixed in there but that's pretty close to 100% pure salt and then the walls would be 96% salt. Wow. All right we get to pick some salt to take home with us. How cool. This one looks nice. It's super clear. Got some red in it. That's cool. We have visited old gold mines before but never a salt mine and this is actually the only one that you can visit in the United States and I was not sure what to expect but I enjoyed that so much. Way more than I thought I would. The guides were incredible. We learned so much. I'll never look at salt the same way. I'm and yeah that was just such a unique experience. How often can you say you went 650 feet underground and were just surrounded by salt. There is another cool spot in town we wanted to check out called Cosmosphere which is supposed to be an incredible space museum. Unfortunately it's closed today so we're gonna have to skip it. So for the rest of the day we're gonna head about an hour southeast to our final stop in Kansas Wichita. Wichita is the largest city in Kansas and is the home of both Pizza Hut and White Castle and it's nicknamed the air capital of the world because many aircraft pioneers started their manufacturing businesses here. There is a lot to see and do here but unfortunately we only have 24 hours so we picked a few spots that we cannot wait to check out and first up we're exploring the Douglas Design District. The Douglas Design District is a three mile stretch along Douglas Avenue which has tons of murals as well as other art to check out so we're gonna walk and drive around and try to see as much of it as we can. They also have this super neat app with a map of all the murals so you can find them easier. All right that's enough murals now let's go get nuts. Welcome to the Nifty Nut House. This Wichita institution has been around since 1937 and has as you may have guessed nuts plus other candies snacks and treats. When you walk in it instantly just smells like sugar. It's like Willy Wonka up in here. There's so much to choose from. There's nuts, there's savory things, there's sweets, there's candies, there's jelly beans. I don't even know where to start. We aren't even really candy people but you just can't resist when you're here. All right let's check out our loot. First up we got some Buckeyes which are chocolate covered peanut butter balls. Oh yeah. A Pez dispenser. This is a Toy Story one. This is our guy Woody. Little throwback candy. Yeah buddy. We got some Big League Chew. I used to chew this when I was a kid hitting dingers out at the ballpark. And then we got two different butter toffee covered nuts. We got pecans and cashews and then last but not least some sour razzles. I made us get these because Adam's never had them. Never had them. And first they're candy then they're gum. Can't come to the Nifty Nut House and not get some nuts huh? Nuts are probably the healthiest thing that we got but we chose the unhealthiest type of nuts. The kind covered in sugar. So crunchy and buttery and sugary. If you come to Wichita you have to come to the Nifty Nut House. You will not want to miss it. Tonight we're staying at the old Cowtown Museum which similar to Stratica last night is a harvest host. And one super nice thing about this spot is that it's right on the river and there's a nice riverside pathway which we're going to take to check out a spot for sunset. The statue behind me is the Keeper of the Plains which is a 44 foot tall five ton steel sculpture donated to Wichita by Native American artist Black Bear Boson in 1974. It sits on a 30 foot pedestal overlooking the city right on the Arkansas River. You heard that right. Here in Wichita they pronounce the river Arkansas even though it's spelt the same as the state of Arkansas. And we specifically came here around sunset because every night the fire pits around the Keeper are lit for 15 minutes. The ceremony is sacred to the native people of Wichita and represents the relationship of earth, water, air, and fire. I thought the ceremony was at seven but it turns out it's actually at nine and we are in a bit of a sugar coma so I don't think we're quite gonna make it. We had a great night sleeping at the old Cowtown Museum and now it's time to check it out. This is a 23 acre open air living history museum that takes you back in time to what Wichita was like from 1865 to 1880. It costs nine dollars per adult which seems like a steal for a museum and has over 40 buildings with 27 being original plus different demonstrations to enjoy. As we mentioned this is a living history museum so some of the buildings have employees that are in period attire that will tell you about the building you're in as well as show you some of the tasks that would have been done in that building. We were just in the carpenter shop and he was showing us all the old tools and showing us how some things work. So you just put that guy in there and now you can't move it. We're in the barber shop right now so back in the day after you come off the trail into a new town you can come into a barber shop not only get a haircut your hair is probably super long and you're really needing one but you can also come in the back take a full-on bath because you know they're going to be stinky. So come in here get washed down get a new haircut and leave a completely new man. We just made a quick stop at the saloon where Adam got to play some cards and we of course had to grab some drinks while we were there. This is sarsaparilla which is basically a root beer cream soda mix is what they told me. Oh that's good. I lost all my money in the saloon so I gotta drown my sorrows. I just love these kinds of museums where you get to walk through a bunch of old buildings that have been recreated into what they would have been like back in the day. It's one thing to read about history but I personally learned so much more in settings like this where I get to see the history and walk through the history. This museum has been incredible we have loved every single second we've spent here. It has been a fun filled few days here in Kansas especially getting to do a bunch of things that are unique to the state and there are still a ton that we weren't able to get to so we'll have to come back. But for now it's time to hit the road and head south to our final new state of the year Oklahoma where we have a ton of adventures planned. Someone drank a little bit too much sarsaparilla and got himself in a little bit of trouble. I don't know how I got in here. Being from Texas you know I know how to lasso. Come out of the womb lassoing. That's right. I'm pining in a corner because there's a lot of people here and I get nervous. There are basically four steps.