Wichita and southern Kansas

Wichita is in southern Kansas, at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers. It began as a trading post and cattle town in the 1870s and, in the 20th century, became one of the largest airplane manufacturing centers in the United States, with factories that gave the city the nickname of the world’s aviation capital. It is the state’s largest city and has Kansas’s busiest airport.

At the meeting of the waters, a 13-meter steel statue, the Keeper of the Plains, raises its arms to the sky. The city has the Old Cowtown Museum, a 19th-century village with costumed interpreters, the Kansas Aviation Museum in the art-deco terminal of the old airport, the Sedgwick County Zoo, and the Botanica botanical garden.

About an hour northwest, Hutchinson houses spacecraft that went to space at the Cosmosphere, including the Apollo 13 capsule, and takes visitors down about 200 meters into an active salt mine. Farther west, along Highway 50, Dodge City recreates an 1876 street from the buffalo-hunting and cattle-drive era at the Boot Hill Museum, and the wagon ruts from the Santa Fe Trail can still be seen nearby on the prairie.

This destination brings together 3 cities: Wichita, Hutchinson, Dodge City.