Rural Kansas: Come and Get It!

I want to go to the rhubarb festival in Glasco and the meatloaf festival in Paxico.

I want to see the drinking fountain in Cawker City that the daughter of Harrison Cawker gave to the city in 1914. I don't really know if Harrison Cawker was a great man but I know he won a poker game and therefore got to name the city after himself!

I want to stay at the Silver Bell Motel in Longton because the website entry says that it has the reputation of being the cleanest and most inexpensive motel in existence. Wow. In existence! I've got to see that and I want to spend money to stay there.

I want to take my Dad to Piqua (Woodson County) on Tuesday and get him a haircut. That's the day the barber shop is open in the back of the Piqua Co-op.

Now you can find out about these kind of things and more on a website that makes its debut today! The website is getruralkansas.org.

Representatives from 80 rural communities took two-day classes last summer to earn a page on this website and to learn tools needed to produce and populate a community page on this site. For now, you'll only see 40 communities in the drop down list. The others are still working on it. It takes a lot of time and many of these folks are volunteers or are overworked in their community capacity.

Go to this site. Play with it. Have fun learning about Kansas and make a list of places to go! Let us know if something isn't working or if there are any problems in navigating.

Also, when you click on a community, you'll find that many offer Facebook, Twitter, or blog connections. Become a Follower of your favorite towns. The idea is that these social networking devices will be used by the community to help the world "get" why and how we are who we are.

The website is just a start in a collective promotion called "Rural Kansas: Come and Get It." More to come down the line but for now, it's great fun to share this website!

I also want to give a big shout out to WenDee for helping in a zillion ways but mostly for helping with all the pictures, and to LogicMaze for creating this site and being so willingly helpful. Also, thanks to Patsy Terrell, Kathy Kajinami, and Cort Anderson for helping with the classes. And thanks to Regina, Becky and the state travel office for the grant that made this possible. It's been a great team effort.

Mostly, hats off to the rural community folks for making time to do this. Because of you, we can say, rural Kansas, it's a wonderful place to live and visit. Come and Get It!

KE #2 Marci Penner