We stayed at Lake Afton for 2 nights just as a stopover and drive break. The lake was pretty, though, and had a little playground for the kids close by.
After leaving Lake Afton we stopped at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. This was a really cool space museum with all sorts of real and replica space artifacts. They have a real SR-71 hanging in the main lobby, and the real Apollo 13 capsule in the museum. We went on Pi day so the museum did a fun scavenger hunt. We had to find various artifacts based on clues, and calculate different things using Pi. At the end we got a sticker and a Discovery coin. It was a fun stop for a couple hours on our drive to Great Bend.
Until Google maps navigated us down a dirt road instead of staying on the main paved highway.
We stayed in Great Bend for several days and visited Cheyenne Bottoms, a big wildlife refuge and migratory stopover for many birds. We didn’t really know what to expect. There weren’t any hiking trails, but we drove around the lake and stopped to look at various birds through the binoculars. We saw sandpiper, kestrel, red tail hawks, white pelicans, Canada geese, a great blue heron, and lots of different ducks.
On our drive out of Great Bend, we stopped at Fort Larned. This was a really neat Fort that’s been preserved very well. It had a great museum that talked a lot about the tensions between the Native American tribes nearby and the settlers trying to move in. It also discussed the Santa Fe Trail and its history.
We stayed at Lake Scott State Park for a couple days taking a day trip to Monument Rocks. Kansas is so flat, so seeing these random bluffs sticking up was definitely jarring. It was a neat little day trip. You could get right up to the rocks and see tons of marine fossils embedded in a layer of sandstone.
Our stay at Lake Scott was not great because of crummy neighbors. Sometimes you just get unlucky with the campers around you. We still had a decent time with the campground playground nearby and checking out the Canada geese.
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