Winning back-to-back championships and "Summer Road Trip 2023"

May travel recap – track & field season comes to a close

In my real job, May was a very hectic and very memorable month. Our men’s track and field team at

Wichita State won back-to-back AAC Outdoor Championships, defeating the highly ranked and incredibly tough opponent Houston (coached by Carl Lewis). It came down to the final events and our guys pulled through for one of the most dramatic victories in my 25 year coaching career. It can take decades of coaching to have one moment like that, and I’ve been fortunate to have more than my share since I started coaching in 1998.

That championship took place in hot and muggy Tampa, Florida. I didn’t do any YouTube filming while I was there like I did 3 years ago, but I was able to get out to a couple other places in May. The weekend after going to Tampa, I took a short trip to Chase County, Kansas, where I filmed a small town, USA, video about beautiful Cottonwood Falls, and then the next day explored the rest of the county looking for ghost towns (2 videos coming up about that).

A few days later I was back on a plane headed to Sacramento, California, for the NCAA West Prelims. We were there for 6 days, and these meets have a lot of down time, so I took a couple early mornings to explore around the area. I released a ghost town video about the Chinese community of Locke last week, and I have two more videos I’ll be working on in the coming weeks.

My coaching for the year ended at the NCAA West Prelims. I still have plenty to do around the office, but I should be able to get out and travel much more in June and July.

May YouTube recap – bouncing back with help from The Oregon Trail

I had mentioned in previous blog posts that the previous couple of months have gone well, but not as well as December through February. The month of May, and in particular the last half of May, went considerably better and a few of the videos that were the most popular were somewhat unexpected.

The 8 videos I published in May did decent, with all of them getting between about 2,000 and 5,000 views. None of them were unbelievably popular though. The most popular video for the month was the 10 Smallest Towns in Texas. This video has done consistently well and continues to gain views even though it was released in February. It picked up over 18,000 views in May (over 120,000 views total).

While the Texas video has been doing well for months, the other videos that were popular in May were surprising. Last summer I published 10 videos about my trip on The Oregon Trail. They did ok when I put them out, but nothing that was much more than a normal video. For some reason they really took off this month with over 40,000 views. The Idaho part 1 video had over 15,000 by itself.

Maybe people are starting to look for summer road trip ideas? And it’s interesting that it was the Idaho video that did the best. YouTube is unpredictable.

As for the channel overall, May brought in around 150k total views and we picked up almost 800 new subscribers. This brings the lifetime totals to 2.55 million views and 14.4k subscribers!

Upcoming travels

I am going out to Comanche County, Kansas, this weekend in hopes of exploring several small towns and ghost towns. It’s the fourth smallest county by population in the state (1,689).

The following week I’m trying to venture over to Arkansas to find the 10 smallest towns in the state. Earlier this year I put out a poll on YouTube asking which state people would like to see the next version of the “10 Smallest Towns” and Arkansas won by a slim margin over Colorado. I’ve done some research and the towns are very spread out around the state. I think it’ll take 3 days to see them all. I’ll also try to find other ghost towns and interesting places along the way.

I’m not sure if/where I’ll go in the last couple weekends of the month. I’ve been wanting to go to Wichita’s Cowtown so maybe I’ll stay here for once haha.

Summer road trip – US 50

In my recent Q&A video, I announced I’ll be doing a summer road trip on US 50 from Kansas to California. US 50 actually goes all the way from the east coast to the west coast, but I don’t have time to do the whole thing this year – maybe I’ll complete it in the future. Fun fact, it goes just a few miles north of where I grew up in Ohio!

I’m planning for the US 50 road trip to be from July 12-29, although I’ll be taking a few days in the middle to stop in Breckenridge, Colorado, to hang out with our coaching staff. I’m hoping to explore some more places in Colorado while I’m there too. Last time I was there I made two videos including visiting the real South Park!

I will talk in more detail in next month’s blog about the US 50 trip. I’m very excited for it and have already started some early planning!

Upcoming June video releases (for the diehards)

I always like to reward anyone who is interested enough to have continued reading this far :)

Here’s what I have coming up on the channel …

Thu, Jun 1 – California Ghost Towns #1 – Locke & State Route 160

Sun, Jun 4 – small town, USA – Freedom, OK

Thu, Jun 8 – Chase County, KS, Ghost Towns #2 (#1 was released Feb ‘22)

Sun, Jun 11 – small town, USA – Coldwater, KS

Thu, Jun 15 – Chase County, KS, Ghost Towns #3

Sun, Jun 18 – Old Sacramento, CA

Thu, Jun 22 – Comanche County, KS, Ghost Towns

Sun, Jun 25 – Arkansas Top-10 Smallest Towns

Thu, Jun 29 – California Ghost Towns #2 – Coloma

Like every month, I end up changing what I post here, so we’ll see how this ends up. Some of it depends on what I find in Arkansas.

Thanks again for all the support! Until next time, safe travels!