Spring 2022 trip - Days 6 and 7, Thursday and Friday April 28th and 29th - Kansas City (MO) to Manhattan (KS) - 3 hikes totalling 8.6 miles

 Thursday

We headed out from our hotel and visited the Harry S Truman Library and museum.  It came recommended from Dan and David and is the kind of thing I like to do but hadn't planned on doing this trip.  The museum is fantastic and seems to be just coming off a very successful remodel.  There were a lot of interesting exhibits and they had the best interactive touch screen exhibits I've ever seen.  We didn't spend too much time there because we had a drive to do and I already know a fair bit about Truman but it is undoubtedly one of the best museums of that type.





 

The drive to Manhattan went by relatively quickly other than that the museum had taken us 10 miles further east of Kansas City.  I meandered around the southern side of KC suburbia until we got into Kansas and then suburbia died out pretty quickly and higher speed driving set in.  The rest of the trip was quite speedy thanks to Kansas's generous speed limits.  


 

We arrived in Manhattan at about 3 pm.  We had to decide if we wanted to tackle the bigger of the hikes we wanted to do that evening or wait until Friday.  We opted to attack the Konza Prairie hike right away despite the temperatures being in the mid 80's.  It was a gorgeous hike through a relatively undisturbed prairie landscape, something that is almost gone in the US.  The 6 mile hike spent a lot of time on some relatively high ridge of hills with lots of limestone rocks in interesting bands or layers.  There were fires or field burning visible in the distance and an interesting government (FAA?) radio installation at one of the prominent points.  The entire Konza area is owned by the Nature Conservancy and in this location they do a lot of serious scientific research which we read about both at the prairie site and later in the museum.











 

The hike was quite tiring because it was very warm, had a lot of ups and downs and was relatively long.  We enjoyed a steak dinner at Texas Road House after the hike.  Our hotel in Manhattan was a disappointing Best Western. The Jacuzzi tub was nice but there wasn't much else about that property that met our expectations.

Friday

We knocked a lot of a chores out.  We went clothes shopping, we walked a few miles on a linear trail along the River in Manhattan. We also went to the Flint Hills discovery center, explored some of the areas near Kansas State University and bowled and did laundry.  Later we watched an interesting movie, Station Agent, in our room before having a soak in the tub.  It sounds like a very busy day but oddly it was the one day so far when we didn't have more we wanted to do than time to do it.  There was quite a bit of down time during parts of the day.  Around 6:30 pm a terrible thunder storm started. There was a lot of wind and the potential for severe weather. Thankfully it passed by 8:30.

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