With local culture and tasty grub under my belt, I set out toward my remaining goal: the Flint Hills, where some of the last tallgrass prairie is preserved and bison have recently been reintroduced. But it turned out that local culture wasn’t done with me yet. I decided to take the long route to the Hills and stopped off in Chanute at the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum (safarimuseum.com), one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking museums I’ve been to in a while.

Martin and Osa Johnson may not be well known today, but they were household names back in the 1920s. Naturalists and adventurers, they traveled the world, filming never-before-seen images from the South Pacific and Africa.

Though it also contains an impressive collection of African masks, headdresses and other artifacts, the museum mostly chronicles the lives of the Johnsons, both of whom were raised in Kansas. As a teenager, Martin aggressively sought a job as a cook on Jack London’s voyage to the “South Seas,” and then kept on traveling. He was soon joined by Osa, with whom he eloped when she was 16. They would return to the South Pacific and film what even today is riveting footage of cannibalistic and headhunting cultures, including their capture by the Big Namba tribe of Malekula Island in the New Hebrides. They also made impressive nature films in Africa, a genre that still fascinates today but back then — without a telephoto lens — was perilous to pull off. (Osa, quite the sharpshooter, is shown in one film taking out a charging lion.) Leave plenty of time to watch the films, which are available by request on DVD.

For me, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of all this is how offensive their language and attitude seem today. In one film showing Pacific Islander children having their heads bound, Mr. Johnson, narrating, says, “It didn’t seem to affect their intelligence. As a matter of fact, they don’t have any intelligence to start with.” This was the thought-provoking part: it was a bit of a shock — but still fascinating — to hear such dated offensiveness stated in such a straightforward way.

Again I set out to Flint Hills — and again I was sidetracked. I caught a sign along two-lane U.S. 75 that, proved irresistible to my curious urban brain: “Livestock Auction, 6 p.m.” Soon I had a front-row seat at the Coffey County Fair, watching 4-H members ages 7 to 18 march steer and heifers around a ring to the mesmerizing slur of an auctioneer’s call. It was a spectacle, and I quickly became a sideshow as the good people of Coffey County explained what was going on: this was a premium auction, in which bidders were not buying the animals but essentially donating a cash prize to the young participants who had raised them.