Destination Ride: A Secret Sunflower Field in Kansas (which isn't a secret anymore)

This time last year, I started seeing pictures all over my FB newsfeed of friends with their families in fields of sunflowers. We live in Kansas, the Sunflower State; how cool is that!?! Asking around led me to the jackpot - or sunflower heaven - Grinter Farms in Tonganoxie, Kansas. After doing a bit of research I found the farm. It's located just off a highway that I traveled twice a week the year prior to take my daughter to swim practice.

Last year, I couldn't convince my family that it would be FUN to drive out

to the farm to take pictures, so I asked if any Bouncing Buns ladies would be interested in cycling out to the fields in west Tonganoxie and back. It would be approximately 20 miles to and 20 miles back. Okay, I was a little over ambitious of the ride distance since 40 miles was a little too much for our group of mostly runners, not cyclists. After talking with Jackie, we made a more doable plan. We would drive to east Tonganoxie, park and hop on our bikes and ride to west Tonganoxie. This would cut our total cycling distance to just over 16 miles.

Here are some pictures from last year's ride:

For a donation, the farmer and his wife allow
visitors to take home a sunflower. I rode home with
this gigantic sunflower in my backpack.

At the time, I was just hoping that my sunflower would survive the Kansas winds of cycling back to our cars. It never occurred to me that the wind was also spreading the pollen from the sunflower directly to Jane, who was cycling behind me the entire way back to our cars. That night, Jane ended up at the ER with an allergic reaction--oops, so SORRY Jane!

Fast forward to this year, Grinter Farms started posting daily reports of the growth of the sunflowers to their FB site. I gave a heads up to the BB ladies that we would plan another ride to the fields again (Jane was having no part of this year's ride since I almost killed her last year).

Jolene, another BB member, offered to map a different route for us this year that would eliminate having to cycle on the busy 5 lane highway from last year's route. The new route was perfect and much safer (Thanks, Jolene)!

Yay, we are almost there!

Oh NO--where are the sunflowers?! They were in the field to our right last year.

Whew! The sunflowers were in another field.

A few folks taking pictures (one person was using a drone camera) when we arrived asked me where we were cycling to. I happily responded that this was our destination. And we were not disappointed one bit! The sunflowers were amazing and we enjoyed taking in the beauty!

A nice lady, who was also enjoying the sunflowers, saw our bikes and we started chatting about biking and trail running. When I asked her if she wouldn't mind snapping a group photo of us with my camera phone (at the time, I didn't know that she was a professional photographer), she gladly said yes and then started taking pictures of us with her own camera. Thank you, Nadine Redd, of Nadine Redd Photography, for capturing some fun memories for us! And THANK YOU Farmer Ted and his wife for allowing visitors to your fields--the Bouncing Buns will be back next year!