Motorcycle Rider News Road Trips

Ever considered a road trip to Flint, Kansas? Really, and no, I'm not kidding. Kansas isn't as boring as you might think. Soaring and diving from hilltop to valley along one of the quiet country highways through the Flint Hills will quickly challenge your notions of prairie. Flat? Not here. Empty? Not if you look closely.

Actually, Flint Hills is one of the few lingering places that remain unspoiled, and ripe for your next road trip. This area has even been photographed by National Geographic, for its amazing fields of wildflowers, waving grasses, and undulating prairie hills with distant purple horizons.

Just 490 miles from Denver, the Flint Hills extend from near the Nebraska border south into Oklahoma. The Flint Hills Scenic Byway is a two-lane, paved road easily reached from the Kansas Turnpike, I-70, U.S. 50 and U.S. 56.

Drive the 48-mile national scenic byway through the heart of the Flint Hills, the nation's largest remaining tallgrass prairie. Along the winding road from Council Grove south to Cassoday, the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway twists and soars through one of the most distinctive, and lightly populated, landscapes in America. Cattle dot the hillsides, modern replacements for the buffalo that once roamed the region. Some 24 landmarks remain in Council Grove from the days when it was a frontier hub on the Santa Fe Trail.

Farther south at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the continent's largest remaining tract of tallgrass, consider parking your bike and hiking the trails that wind through the grassy highlands, and you can tour the 19th century limestone ranch house that serves as the preserves headquarters. In Cottonwood Falls, the 1873 courthouse towers over the red bricks of Main Street. Sweeping horizons and carpets of wildflowers will make you forget you're actually riding through Kansas.

You can point your scoot to follow the trails of forgotten tribes and imagine the dust of wagon trains rolling westwards. It's the peacefulness, the unspoken connection with Mother Nature that will have you breathing in the fresh fragrances of the prairie. No fighting traffic here while riding the Flint Hills Scenic Byways.

Plan your visit to coincide with the first Sunday of the month, and you can join over 3,000 motorcyclists at the south end of the byway for brunch at the Cassoday Café. Make it an overnighter, and stay at Grand Central Hotel. Be sure to look up and be amazed at the how close the stars seem in the beauty of the night. Read more at: http://www.byways.org/explore/byways/2095/ind ex.html

 

Originally Printed in the April 2010 Issue

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