Dwight Hunter Blogs: May 2021 Road Trip to Kansas Part Three of Five Series

Rooks County, south of Palco

We left Great Bend on Sunday, May 23rd and drove in a big semi-circle for most of the day to finally end up for the night in Lawrence, Kansas, home of Kansas University. Parts 3 - 4 - 5 will detail that Sunday.

First up - Hays, Ellis, Nicodemus.

We took highway 96 out of Great Bend to reach highway 183. Highway 183 played a big part in my life: it was the highway through Stockton, through Hays, runs near a sister's house, and was the highway that led me to a new life between my 8th grade and Freshman year.

When we got to south of Hays, we took the alternate bypass around to head to Frontier Park. This road takes one pass the historic Fort Hays site but we weren't heading to see the fort; we were headed to see the buffalo!

Baby calf on the ground

Calving season was upon us and we saw baby bison romping around their large pen. We thoroughly enjoyed the show they put on for us!

We decided to forego driving on 183 and instead took the bypass all the way around Hays to I-70. On I-70 we put the metal down and drove the short trip to the Ellis, KS exit. It was spitting rain on us but that was the only time we ran into rain for the whole day.

I played against some team from Ellis during school. The home of Walter P Chrysler of Chrysler fame is in Ellis. We took the exit and drove on county blacktop for several miles, weaving through Ellis County and then into Rooks County. We crossed the Saline River into Rooks County and again in part five.

Many of the homesteaders and settlers of Nicodemus took a train to Ellis and walked on foot towards Nicodemus. Probably pretty close to the road we were taking from Ellis to Nicodemus. I was able to ride through Palco, a little village I had not seen in a long time and probably won't for a long time if ever.

We took Highway 18 to Damar and saw the beautiful twin steeples of the Catholic Church in Damar from the highway. Then we took another county blacktop to Highway 24. By this time we were only a mile from Nicodemus. Nicodemus is very important to me - I have written about this National Historic Site many times. I'm just going to post a lot of pictures for the rest of this blog post. But I'm going to end my text by saying -- I love Nicodemus!