Coterie has kids in many of the productions, kids in the audience, kids learning from professional actors in acting classes, and they stage works written by teens during their young playwrights festival. This is a truly impressive facility and a real treasure in the Midwest; I particularly like how they tackle a lot of plays for tweens and teens, who are often left behind after the typical “Charlie Brown” school musical experience.

Raise your hand if you wanted to be Snoopy. I thought so.

The 2010-2011 season at Coterie includes a sci-fi triple feature (Flowers for Algernon is one of the three) a 13-and-older Sorority House of the Dead horror play around Halloween, Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, the Bridge to Terabithia, a Greek Mythology Olympiaganza that sounds amazing, Ben Franklin’s Apprentice, the young playwright festival and a new version of the musical The Wiz.

The quick video clip below is from one of their latest performances, “Lucky Duck.” Here is the direct link to the Coterie video on YouTube if you can’t see the box below, and don’t forget to say hello on the Coterie Theatre Facebook Page.

My own parents took me to the theater – all sorts of plays – at every stage of my young life. I am forever grateful to them for that, so get yourself to Kansas City and give your kids the gift of a live theater experience made just for them.

It only takes 70 seconds going straight down an elevator shaft to see one of the 8 Wonders of Kansas.

A mining museum  –  the Kansas Underground Salt Museum in Hutchinson, Kansas.

A working salt mine  –  although museum visitors are not anywhere near any blasting or ongoing work.

And Batman costumes  –  because at a constant 68 degrees and 45% relative humidity in 325 feet of solid salt, the already-mined sections are a perfect home for the Underground Vaults and Storage company’s long-term records and artifact storage, including a bizarre variety of Hollywood’s goodies and film masters.

Salt Museum visitors can take a guided tram ride around the maze of mine shafts that are now a museum for one of the biggest industries in this part of Kansas;  the mining of rock salt.

Wearing the required cool hard hats is merely a bonus for kids.

I liked the mining history stories, the sense of expansiveness as the tram drove around (the excavated area is massive) and even the pitch blackness and total silence when our guide turned off the lights for a moment, to give us a chance to pretend to be moles far below the prairie.

Check them out if you’re in the area (advance reservations are highly recommended) or visit them virtually on their museum Facebook page, on Twitter @650feetDown, on the KUSM YouTube channel and on their MySpace page.

(The video below, from the souvenir rock salt pile, was shot during a blogger’s press/familiarization trip courtesy of the Hutchinson Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.  My museum admission fee was paid as a part of the trip.)

Here is the URL link directly to the video, in case you can’t see it below.

While it may seem that your family would have to travel to NASA facilities in Houston or Florida for such an opportunity, in reality one of the most established programs is in Hutchinson, Kansas at the Cosmosphere and Space Center.

It’s the Future Astronaut Training Program, one of many camps and hands-on programs offered at “the Cos” (including a 5-day residential camp for grandparents and their grandkids.)

To check it out, your kids might like to investigate the Cos online. They have a UStream video show – What’s Up at the Cos? – and they’re on Facebook and Twitter (President and CEO Chris Orwoll is @CosmosphereCEO and educator Joel – seen briefly strapping me in below in the video – is @CosED.)

During my recent blogger’s familiarization tour around the city, I had an opportunity to get ahead of the kids and climb into one of the training devices myself.

It looks like a gyroscope, but the formal name is Multi-Axis Trainer.

You can hear me hollering as my body goes in multi-axis directions. Don’t worry….I threatened to hurl coffee and coffeecake, but you’re safe in viewing it.

If you can’t see the video embed box, here is the URL directly to the video on my YouTube channel.

(Update June 2009 – I’ve decided that my Hutch posts warrant an additional disclosure line since some readers might not understand the term “blogger fam tour.” The Cosmosphere and Hutchinson CVB paid for my lodging and expenses while I was in Hutchinson. They did not tell me what I could or could not write about. I paid my own airfare to/from Kansas.)

The Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City is a little misleading; it seems like the perfect place to take the kids, but in many ways it’s better for adults and older children.

It’s not that there aren’t zillions of neat toys, trains, dolls, dollhouses, Teddy bears, marbles and other treasures – there are indeed, but the vast majority are beautiful antiques that are protected behind display cases.

It’s a “look but don’t touch” sort of place, which  was fine with me but might be a disappointment for very young people (I’d take the little ones to one of the museum workshops or special events so they can get hands onto crafts and learning projects.)

Spread across two floors of the 1911 Tureman Mansion in Kansas City, Missouri is an incredibly comprehensive collection of every wondrous toy imaginable.

I’ve been a sucker for detailed dollhouses since my own parents took me as a child to see the amazing Queen Mary’s dollhouse in the UK.

The first floor of the Toy and Miniature Museum has all sorts of dollhouses with lovely delicate period furnishings, plus a big section of toy trains, planes, cars and Noah’s Arks.

The Miniatures Gallery has beautifully-lighted tiny art miniatures to inspect, most to 1/12 scale; I loved the tiny dancing skeletons and eensy furniture.

(I am working very hard not to use the word “Lilliputian” in this blog post. I know that “eensy” is not a word; this is a time when it is fun to be an editor-free blogger….)

The highlight of the second floor galleries is probably the Marble Games and Gallery.  I don’t even know how to play marbles, but the colors and swirling patterns in the glassware have always appealed to me. These were gorgeous and their lighted displays showed them to perfection.

The gift shop was OK, but the surprising number of generic “Made in China” toys was rather disappointing. I thought, for example, that I’d see a lot more variety of locally-made Moon Marbles.

I recommend a trip to this museum if you’re in Kansas City, even if – or especially if – you are an adult.

My Iowa guest blogger friend Jessica was with me, and she said she always loved looking at this machine when she was a kid (never mind how many times we pushed that button to make bows before I said, “Oh yeah, I can shoot a little video of this!”)

I wanted to let my readers know that I was accepted to attend the September 2008 Travel Media Showcase conference as a journalist. The chance to make lots of travel-related contacts there means more opportunities for me to learn about and visit places for the Family Travel blog.

There is a selection process for TMS journalists and travel publications to ensure a good mix of first-time and previous attendees, across a spectrum of travel writing, both in print and online.  I’m looking forward to seeing lots of fellow travel writers, like the Traveling Mamas, folks from the new planning site TravelMuse, representatives from Smarter Travel and Budget Travel, editors from Education.com and CHOW.com and Tim Leffel, author of World’s Cheapest Destinations and my editor at the Perceptive Travel blog.

Our schedule of events includes various receptions, familiarization tours around Kansas City (the host city) and many appointments with representatives from Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus and tourism offices from around the world.

I’m looking forward to it!

Related posts:

• Kansas City, here we come

As I played with my disposable video camera and finally reviewed its contents, I found that I’d made some clips when I visited the Ingalls home with my daughter.

After some minor wrestling with Microsoft’s Movie Maker on my laptop, this is what we saw on the prairie (although it was too dark to film the interior, I can assure you that the one-room house had a couple of beds, a table and chairs and a few cooking items, and that was it for amenities.)

Big enough for visitors to feel that bustling urban energy, yet small enough to be accessible for families, I think KC would be a great place to live as well. There’s a good cross-section of activities and interests, and the parks and fountains everywhere really add to the ambiance.

There are good itinerary suggestions here for the KC novice.

My teen and I visited two popular sections of town in the afternoon and evening. First up was the Country Club Plaza shopping area; the name is a little misleading because the architecture and art are Spanish/European and the colorful 15-block section was built in the 1920′s when that part of the city was “the country.” Many of the stores and restaurants are upscale chains that you can find elsewhere, but there are local spots, too. It’s very pretty and walkable, with free parking.

We were hungry as the evening wore on, so when the restaurant waits were too overwhelming at the Plaza, we drove to the historic 18th and Vine district for a fabulous Southern cuisine dinner (“Soul Food with Elegance”) at the Peachtree Restaurant. We still had to wait a little, but it was worth it. I had some terrific catfish with black-eyed peas and collard greens, and my teenager had the meatloaf. The sweet potato rolls were divine. We were a little underdressed since we hadn’t planned on ending up there, but the staff made us feel most welcome.

The soft live jazz during dinner made up for not having time to take in the show at the nearby Blue Room, which is attached to the American Jazz Museum. Minors are allowed with an adult, so it’s a good venue to take older kids to hear live jazz performances.

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is also right up the street in this historically black section of town. Anyone who likes baseball should pay a visit to this tribute to players who had “a league of their own” until baseball was finally integrated when Jackie Robinson was recruited from the Kansas City Monarchs to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Negro Leagues actually lasted until the 1960s before they folded.

The next day, we spent a lot of time at the huge National World War One Museum, a highlight of Kansas City that opened in December 2006. Most Americans know little about WWI since we weren’t involved on a large scale for very long, but I had a grandfather who served aboard the USS VERMONT and a great-uncle who was gassed in France, so I’ve long had a personal interest.

You may wonder; why is this place in Kansas City?

The museum docent that I talked to felt that because the big Liberty Memorial was built in 1924, there has long been a tangible monument here specifically to commemorate the Great War. They’ve always collected WWI documents and artifacts, so opening the Museum was a logical next step. The focus is not just Americans in the War, but the War as a whole. It’s very comprehensive.

There are excellent videos, dioramas and displays, even little “Reflection Rooms” where you can sit and listen to selections of WWI-era music, poems, prose and personal histories.

In school, most kids only learn that the War started because of some mess in the Balkans, and they have to memorize a tangle of alliances that they don’t care about, so I strongly recommend this Museum to make this turning point in history come alive for them.

I’d love to return to Kansas City someday; it was a pleasure to visit.

Just remember that there’s a Kansas City, Kansas and a Kansas City, Missouri right next to each other, so check Web sites to see which side you’re going to.

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Kansas City, WWI

A helpful guide at the Kaw Mission House told me that there were ruts to see both east and west of town, but from her description, one set was better marked than the other.

Even though that one was a little out of our way, I decided to drive out and see it.

My teenage daughter and fellow traveler was of no use; she was zonked out, still recovering from her all-night reading of the new Harry Potter book.

I drove to the west and found the helpful “Santa Fe Trail Ruts” highway sign that pointed down a unpaved side road. Leaving clouds of dust behind the minivan, I drove hopefully for about a mile, and then found the sign.

Like a complete geek, I jumped out with my camera to look over a fence at….a lot of grass.

The ruts are actually big dents or impressions (called “swales,” about 20 feet wide) in the ground, since the wagons would travel 3 or 4 across. You’d think I could see a big sunken area, but no luck. Apparently the ruts are much easier to make out at certain times of year when the vegetation is not so thick.

Grateful that I had not awoken Her Grogginess just to look at more Kansas grass, I laughed at myself, took a picture of the sign, and for the next few days I was happy to drive a minivan that had bits of old Santa Fe Trail dust clinging to the rear bumper.

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Santa Fe Trail, Kansas, Council Grove

It is definitely not all flat cornfields as many think, including me before I came here. The prairie has a lot more personality than that. Travel writer Rolf Potts grew up near here and lists the Flint Hills as one of ten spots to revel in America.

After we left the site of the original Little House on the Prairie in Independence, and my teenager made her midnight rendezvous with Harry Potter at an Emporia bookstore, it was time to drive a little of the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway (Kansas Highway K-177) and investigate some small towns along the way.

I wish we’d had more time in Emporia to explore the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning Emporia Gazette editor and author William Allen White, but we’ll just have to come back.

After my daughter’s all-night Harry Potter read-a-thon (from just after midnight until she finally shut the book, having finished around 9:30 — yes it’s nice to know that my generally obsessive personality has carried over to her quite well) we loaded up for Cottonwood Falls.

There’s not a whole lot going on there, especially on a sleepy Saturday around noon, but we admired the ornate Chase County Courthouse and had a pleasant lunch (and a lot of coffee!) at the swanky Grand Central Hotel. It seems a little strange to put an upscale hotel here, but there were plenty of people in it, so hurray for the money they bring to the area.

Just a mile or two up from Cottonwood Falls is the headquarters for the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. From the Web site,

“The preserve protects a nationally significant example of the once vast tallgrass ecosystem. Of the 400,000 square miles of tallgrass prairie that once covered the North American Continent, less than 4 percent remains, primarily in the Flint Hills of Kansas.”

There are three guided bus tours that take visitors away from the main Preserve building and out into the prairie, trackless and mostly treeless, as it has been for hundreds of years. The rocky soil made this part of Kansas unsuitable for plowing but great for cattle grazing (and bison grazing, when bison still roamed here.) This saved it from development.

I liked the silence, the constant breeze, and that the prairie grasses are their own ecosystem, with all sorts of plants and bugs and critters moving around if you bend down and watch closely for awhile.

It’s like the ocean; a vast nothingness until you pause and take a closer look.

We kept driving up K-177, taking in the views, until we reached Council Grove, a resupply and jumping-off point for the Santa Fe Trail (complete with the small Last Chance general store.)

There is a self-guided driving tour set up to see the major sites and buildings; pick up a map and tourist info at the Kaw Mission building.

You can catch a bite to eat at Hays House Restaurant and Tavern, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant west of the Mississippi.

Yes, you can order a buffalo burger here, but we had to get going to reach Kansas City.

For more detailed info by a local guy, check out Bill Smith’s fun blog The Flint Hills of Kansas.

If you have an opportunity to even just drive through the Flint Hills, get off of the Interstate and do it. It will really give you and your family an appreciation for our country’s pioneer heritage.

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Flint Hills, Kansas