The big picture: The World's Biggest Easel of Goodland, Kansas

While visiting the easel, you can whet your palette...

...or brush up on your shootin'.

A lot of people think the Plains states of the USA are, well, a bit too plain and a bore to drive through. We couldn't disagree more, as small Midwestern towns are always doing big, kooky things to get you off the Interstate and driving down their Main Streets. Such is the case with the western Kansas farming town of Goodland, 17 miles from the Colorado state line. Here you will find the world's biggest easel, clocking in at 80 feet tall and 45,000 pounds. On it sits a 32-by-24-foot reproduction of one of Vincent Van Gogh's famous sunflower paintings, an appropriate subject, considering Kansas calls itself The Sunflower State and the yellow beauties are a major crop around these parts. And while the easel is the world's biggest, the painting is far from being the world's largest. That distinction belongs to David Aberg's 86,000-square foot "Mother Earth" of Angelholm, Sweden. The easel and painting are still pretty darn big, though, dwarfing a nearby Goodland water tower, jerky shop and gun store. This is one of three giant Van Goghs done by the Canadian conceptual artist Cameron Cross. His goal is to create colossal reproductions of all seven Van Gogh sunflower paintings in seven different countries spanning the globe (the other two are in Canada and Australia). There's a lovely little park around the easel and while we were there some other folks trickled in to walk their dogs and gawk open-mouthed at Goodland's giant flowers in the sky.

Thank you, Goodland, for your over-sized art appreciation that got us off I-70 for a few minutes of fun and frivolity. Way to Gogh.

Cows to the left of me, clover to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you

Right of center

Left of center

Center

There's Middle America, and then there's Lebanon, Kansas. Lebanon is at the exact geographical center of the 48 continental United States and they have the latitude (38,50) and longitude (98,35) to prove it. And, while the north central Kansas town gets its fame from being in the middle, it has more of an edge-of-nowhere feel to it, as long as the edge-of-nowhere is a pretty, pastoral place. Gently rolling hills, dirt roads, the occasional horse running wild...that's about it. But that's okay. The middle of America should be a place for calm, peaceful reflection, far from the frantic coasts to the east and west and international borders north and south. There's a pyramid-like marker with a plaque from 1940 when an L.T. Hagadorn and an L.A. Beardslee literally put Lebanon on the places-in-the-middle-of-other-places map. Sticklers will tell you that the actual really, really, middle point is about a half a mile away on a private farm and this is as close as the marker builders could get. Apparently, the farm's owner didn't want middle-seeking tourists trudging on his land. There's also a trailer with some nice artifacts in it, or so we were told. Unfortunately, in order to unlock the door, you have to call a phone number for an access code and, alas, we were not getting any service on our Motorola. I guess there's just never a phone booth when you really need one. For quiet meditation, there is what has to be one of the nation's smallest chapels, with room for four or less parishioners, depending on girth, built in honor of Elmer and Zeta Stump. But mostly this is just beautiful country, where the middle of nowhere is actually the middle of somewhere, and that somewhere is pretty awesome.

Days of twine and roses: The World's Biggest Ball of Twine of Cawker City, Kansas

1500 miles of twine. That's a lot.

Cawker City has decorated their vacant downtown storefronts with some awesome whimsical twine-inspired paintings:

Your accomodations await.

Cawker City is named after a fellow who won a poker game to decide the town's name.

I've often used the phrase "the world's biggest ball of twine" as a generic label for any really eccentric roadside attraction that makes an awesome feat out of something mundane. It wasn't until recently, though, that I actually got to see one of the actual world's biggest balls of twine (there's more than one, depending on who you believe), which makes its home in the small north central Kansas town of Cawker City. A Mr. Frank Stoeber, a local farmer, started the twine ball with odd bits in 1953 and within four years he had a ball that weighed 5,000 pounds and stood 8 feet tall. In 1961 he gave the ball to Cawker City and at the time of his death in 1974 the ball was 11 feet tall and contained 1.6 million feet of sisal twine (sisal being an agave plant that yields a stiff fiber). To keep the ball growing and its place in the record books, Cawker City holds an annual Twine-A-Thon every August where the public is invited to add odd bits of twine to Mr. Stoeber's overgrown baby (string and yarn are prohibited and rules are strictly enforced). Today, the ball sits under an open air gazebo (its second after outgrowing the first) complete with park benches to meditate on its magnificence. As of September 2009, the ball weighed over 9 tons, has a 40-foot circumference and over 1500 miles of twine -- enough to reach either coast from the heartland of Kansas, or wrap up an awful lot of brown paper packages.

And as if that wasn't enough, Cawker City did something even more wonderful. In the windows of the melancholy downtown abandoned storefronts are parodies of art masterpieces such as The Mona Lisa, The Scream and American Gothic, all containing balls of twine. Local artist Cher Olsen has painted over 40 of these gems that delight with every passing glance, making Cawker City one of the eccentric roadside wonders of the world. To twine own self be true.