Day 5: Underground and Outer Space in Kansas

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It's not a ton of salt, it's closer to 3 tons of pure salt. The Kansas Salt Mine tour takes you 650' below the surface into an active salt mine. Well they don't take you into the active part of the mine, the tour is in part of the mine where they are no longer extracting salt. The tour starts with a quick safety film, visitors are required to follow the same safety precautions as the miners. this means a hard hat must be worn at all times and you must carry a portable emergency respirator. Then it's a 90 second elevator ride down the 650' shaft to the gallery area where you can take a self guided tour until your ready for the train tour. The train is about a 30 minute guided tour that takes you through some of the old mine shafts. Then you can take the Dark Tour, for an extra $3.50 you get to ride around with it so dark you can't see a thing. Actually the darkness part lasts less than a minute. the remainder of the time is spent showing you other old mine shafts.



After the Mine tour I only had to drive a few blocks to Cosmosphere Air and Space Museum. I had once heard that when Ron Howard was looking to have sets made for the movie Apollo 13 he looked at NASA and Cosmosphere. He ended up choosing Cosmosphere because there stuff looked more realistic. Cosmosphere is also the only private company to own a space capsule that flew in space. They were able to purchase Liberty Bell 7 (Gus Grissom's Mercury Capsule) after it was recovered from the Atlantic ocean. Also on display is the Apollo 13 Capsule That was restored here at cosmosphere.

Then it was a nice peaceful drive to Dodge City where I had a nice stake dinner and headed to my hotel room.

Additional Photos

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