Kansas highway makes the list of ‘Most Feared Road Trips in America’ | Opinion

The survey says: US-54 through Kansas ranks No. 35 among the “Most Feared Road Trips in America.”

Being a journalist, people send me these kinds of surveys on the regular, and I usually ignore them.

In fact, just last Sunday I published a guest column from Wichita State University sociologist Chase Billingham saying that they’re pretty much drivel — and I can’t say I disagree with his analysis.

But this one, commissioned by Gunther Mitsubishi in Coconut Creek, Fla., and conducted by QuestionPro, caught my eye because it seems to capture some inescapable realities of driving across the sunflower state.

“Kansas’ US Route 54 was voted as the 35th most feared road trip in the country,” the survey said. “One of the primary concerns when breaking down on US Route 54 is the potential for long stretches of remote and sparsely populated areas” (yep).

“In these rural sections, finding immediate assistance or repair facilities can be difficult, and drivers may have to wait for extended periods before help arrives” (double yep).

And, “Severe weather events, including thunderstorms, tornadoes, and blizzards, can occur, particularly during spring and summer. These weather conditions can reduce visibility, create hazardous driving conditions, and increase the risks for stranded motorists” (triple yep).

I drove US-54 twice last month ago on a round-trip mission excursion to New Mexico. And verdad, it’s not a place I’d ever want to be stranded.

Fortunately, the weather was unremarkable, and I was driving a brand new Toyota Highlander which we’d rented at Eisenhower Airport, and it didn’t yet have a thousand miles on the clock.

My initial thought was the survey missed the scariest thing about Highway 54. You could die of boredom out there.

But the state tourism department actually has a web page titled “Kansas US-54 Road Trip.”

It’s a hoot.

For “things to do,” it suggests “You’ll find countless places to stop and take photos through the Flint Hills and of El Dorado State Park, the largest State Park in Kansas.”

If you want pictures of dead trees sticking up out of a lake that was filled 40 years ago, you can’t go wrong with El Dorado.

Then we get to Wichita: “Those who enjoy city life will love passing through the state’s largest city, Wichita, known for being the ‘Air Capital of the World’’ and home to the Kansas Aviation Museum.”

The museum is housed in an airport terminal that was abandoned in 1954, and captures the atmosphere of an airport terminal that was abandoned in 1954.

I literally laughed out loud when I read the next sentence on the tourism page: “But it isn’t just the large cities with epic museums.”

That was a setup for the aircraft museum in Liberal, America’s most misnamed city. Unfailingly conservative, the town got stuck with the name back in the 1800s because a landowner there liberally allowed travelers to take water from his hand-dug well.

But the tourism department missed possibly the most interesting thing on US-54, the roadside art display of the late M.T. Liggett in Mullinville.

Liggett spent much of his life crafting wind-driven whirlygigs and what he called “totems” out of scrap metal, and erecting them alongside the road.

Driving by at 75 mph, the display seems whimsical and eccentric.

Up close, you realize that Liggett was a pre-QAnon political nutjob and this was his way of airing his conspiracy theories about the government.

His “folk art” includes Hillary Clinton’s head on a swastika body labeled “our jack-booted Eva Braun,” and a swastika-studded tribute to cult leader David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, next to a sheet-metal tombstone equating the ill-fated 1993 siege of their compound with Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Fun for the whole family.

I’m kind of surprised the tourism department folks didn’t highlight that, since they provided some of the money to restore the fading, rusty display to its former glory.

You know, now that I think about it, US-54 is kind of scary.