June travel recap – getting the itch to get out and about
With the spring academic semester ending at the beginning of June, life has been a little less hectic lately. There’s still plenty of work to do around the office, so I’m keeping busy, but looking forward to my big trip later this month (see below).
In June, however, I did get out and explore a little. At the beginning of the month, I spent 2 days driving around the very desolate county of Comanche County, Kansas. I really enjoyed it and released 3 videos about the area. I did a little longer trip over to Arkansas for 4 days finding the smallest towns in the state, which I’m currently releasing this weekend. That was an interesting trip as I literally went to all 4 corners of the state to find these places. There were several parts of the state I had never been to, so that made it interesting. But I also battled some rain that put me behind schedule, as well as getting a flat tire on my final day! Besides filming the smallest towns and two other videos, I did a “behind the scenes” vlog that I might try to put together. We’ll see – I’m not always sure people want to watch stuff like that on my channel and often it feels self-serving.
Here in Wichita, I went over to the Old Cowtown Museum one Sunday and will be putting something together for that. And one day after work last week, I went down to Perry, OK, to explore my buddy Brent Kemnitz’ hometown. That will be a different kind of “small town, USA” video – should be interesting!
Overall, I made one 4-day trip, one 2-day trip, and a couple day trips.
June YouTube recap – Texas rolls on and my “racist” video hits a nerve!
It was a wild month of releasing videos. Overall, I published 9 regular videos and 4 shorts. And while there were some new videos that did well, the one that really got views was the 10 Smallest Towns in Texas that I released in February. Midway through June, this video started randomly getting thousands of views per day and had 67k views in June alone (mostly in the past 2 weeks). It’s quickly headed towards 200k views overall and will be interesting to see how long it will stay popular in the YouTube algorithm. I say keep it rolling Texas!
For recent videos, I released one that could be considered slightly controversial – Zinc, Arkansas. It’s home to the Grand Wizard of the KKK. I don’t do videos like this very often, so I had a lot of people view and make comments that aren’t regular viewers – even his granddaughter commented! Mostly it was received well, but a few local people thought I wasn’t fair in how I portrayed the town. They’ve been hit hard with the “most racist town in America” tag, and even though I didn’t accuse the town of that, a lot of people took it that way. It got a lot of views on the first day I released it and has been pretty steady since. I think it’ll probably end up being one of the more popular videos on the channel over time.
A video that has done surprisingly well is the one I did about the Chinese ghost town of Locke, CA. I don’t have a lot of fans from California, but after a couple weeks of not getting very many views, it started gaining traction and a lot of people from the Golden State started commenting. That’s a good sign because I have one more video from there to release, and I’ll be back there later in July. On the other hand, I released a video about Old Sacramento that did very poorly in comparison. But it wouldn’t surprise me for it to find a future audience as well. Fortunately for me, most of my videos aren’t time sensitive and videos can take off at any given time (Texas 10 smallest towns for example).
But overall, it was a very good month on the channel. Over 210k views and 963 new subscribers. That’s the best month on the channel since February, which was a big blip on the radar. Hopefully this momentum will continue into July!
Upcoming travels
I’ve got my big trip coming up in a couple weeks. However, first I’ve decided to take a couple days this weekend to explore Dade County, MO. It’s kind of a random trip, but I haven’t made any videos about Missouri lately and I know I have a lot of viewers from there wanting to see some new stuff. 2 of the 3 most popular videos on my channel are about Missouri. So, I decided to take this little trip and do a 2-part video like I’ve done about some counties in Kansas. I’m also planning a couple of small town, USA, videos.
Summer road trip – US 50 - Kansas to California
This is a tentative itinerary. I have yet to book hotels. If anyone has any recommendations let me know!
July 12 – Leawood, KS to Newton, KS – staying at my home in Wichita that night
July
13 – Newton, KS to Garden City, KS
July
14 – Garden City, KS to Rocky Ford, CO
July
15 – Rocky Ford, CO to Salida, CO – then up to Breckenridge, CO
July
16-18 – Breckenridge, CO
July
19 – Breckenridge to Salida, CO to get back on US 50 then over to Grand
Junction, CO
July
20 – Grand Junction CO to Salina, UT
July
21 – extra day in Salina, UT
July
22 – Salina, UT to Baker, NV
July
23 – Baker, NV to Eureka, NV
July
24 – extra day in Eureka, NV
July
25 – Eureka, NV to Fallon, NV
July
26 – Fallon, NV to South Lake Tahoe, CA
July
27 – extra day in Lake Tahoe
July
28 – South Lake Tahoe, CA to Sacramento, CA – end of US 50 trip
July
29 – Sacramento, CA to Santa Rosa, CA
July
30 – Flying back to Wichita, KS
My plan is to make 2 US 50 videos per state (KS, CO, UT, NV) and one for CA. I’ll also be filming ghost town videos and other historical sites along the way. I am planning to release these videos from early August until mid-October.
Upcoming video releases (for the diehards)
I like to reward anyone who is interested enough to have continued reading this far :)
Here’s what I have coming up on the channel …
Sun, July 9 – small town, USA – Perry, OK
Thu, July 13 – Old Cowtown Museum – Wichita, KS
Sun, July 16 – small town, USA – Greenfield, MO
Thu, July 20 – Arkansas Ghost Towns #4 – Eros, Bruno
Sun, July 23 – small town, USA – Lockwood, MO
Thu, July 27 – Dade County, MO, Part 1
Sun, July 30 – small town, USA – Greensburg, KS
Thu, Aug 3 – Dade County, MO, Part 2
Sun, Aug 6 – Behind-the-scenes of my Arkansas trip
Thu, Aug 10 – this will begin my US 50 series that will last until Oct 12
Like every month, I end up changing what I’ve planned, so we’ll see how this ends up.
Thanks again for all the support! Until next time, safe travels!
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