Wallace

Wallace is a charming old town with grain elevators, a mural, and some older buildings on Main Street, including a super cute café and antique store in the old bank building. 

The lady at the café confided to us, "I may be biased, but I think our Fort Wallace Museum just east of here is probably one of the best museums around." Turns out, we agreed with her! The museum was a gem, featuring a huge collection of interesting artifacts, in beautifully built display cases. From ichthyosaurs to frontier warfare to antique pump organs, this museum had a little bit of everything. We loved it.

Sharon Springs

This town is near Weskan, but with its paved neighborhood streets and nice park, it seems a bit newer. There are several churches here (we saw Methodist, Baptist, and Wesleyan ones), as well as a few grain elevators. Main Street had some thriving businesses, a food pantry, senior center, and the Wallace County courthouse. The city park was sponsored by Eastern Colorado (!) Bank. The kids really enjoyed the park; it was train-themed and had a pristine public restroom that featured an aggressively polite reminder to flush.

Weskan

Weskan is the last town before "Colorful Colorado" on US-40. So of course, we had to go see the Colorado sign while we were there. A Union Pacific train came through while we were parked there on the border, which provided a great reminder of how these highways ended up where they are today. The transcontinental railroad of the 19th century was second only to the Civil War in shaping the contours of this state. 

Weskan is about twelve miles south of Mount Sunflower, the highest point in Kansas. Like most towns out here, it has a grain elevator. Surrounding the town are many fields, some sown with winter crops, others brown and bare in early May. Trees have been carefully planted around homesteads and buildings, windbreaks punctuating the blustery landscape. Weskan has a Bible church and a Christian Missionary Alliance church -- one of the few CMA churches we've seen in Kansas. The town also has gravel roads, a park with a picnic pavilion, a veterans' wall of honor, and a consolidated school (Go, Coyotes!) Myrick played taps on his melodica near the veterans' memorial.

Mount Sunflower

I've seen Mount Sunflower on Kansas maps since I was a little boy. All the atlases and geography textbooks mention this highest point in Kansas, so it's got to be pretty impressive, right? Well, sort of. But not in the way you might think. 

The landmark itself is located on a working cattle ranch, down several well-maintained gravel roads. It's private property, but the owners have generously opened it up to the public. It features handmade folk art, a guest book with signatures visitors from all over, and a lovely view. In the surrounding fields, we saw antelope, mourning doves, meadowlarks, and lots of cattle.

The impressive thing about Mount Sunflower is the impressive thing about the Sunflower State itself: Caring, thoughtful people have made something here that's worth coming to see. It may not be very fancy, but it's charming, unique, and more than worth the trip. The hospitality, can-do attitude, and cheerful humility of Kansas are on full display here at the highest point in the state.