Ryan & Samantha

I recently read an article in the NY Times about how Americans travel to other states or other countries, learning about the history and landmarks of other places, and yet don’t even know their own local areas. The article encouraged the readers to get out and explore their own area before spending lots of money to go other places. That really made me think–I’ve known people who have lived in Kansas all their life and can tell you more about Yellowstone or the Eiffel Tower than they can about landmarks in their own state (Kansas has landmarks? You mean like the largest ball of twine?).

Kansas is more than just sunflowers and The Wizard of Oz. The state has been home to presidents, astronauts, entertainers, and industry pioneers. It contains the world’s largest tallgrass prairie, landscapes with badlands-like canyons, and wildlife areas that attract over 300 species of migrating bird from all over the country. Kansas has a rich pioneer history, with the Santa Fe, Chisholm, and Oregon Trails running through the state, where wagon ruts can still be seen today! Our state was also part of the Civil War and has scars to show for it; there are graves, memorials for battles, and several forts still standing that tell the history.

This year Ryan and I are on a quest to visit the entire state and share its landmarks, historic places, and people with you. We’re using the Kansas Official Visitors Guide as our guidebook and will go to every region in the state: eastern wooded hills, Flint Hills, central prairie, and the western high plains. We’ll blog about each visit in the hopes of encouraging more Kansans to go out and see what their state has to offer.

Our first stop: Wichita. I can’t wait for you to join us!

Today, January 29th, our beautiful state Kansas turns 156 years old. Growing up I was surrounded by Kansas history and spent a lot of time at the Kansas Museum of History volunteering in the gift shop with Grandma Betty. I’m pretty sure that’s where our tradition of making Kansas Day cookies started. Each year Grandma Betty would bake sugar cookies in the shape of a sunflower (with a chocolate star in the middle) and the shape of the state of Kansas (with a chocolate chip on the capitol Topeka) for me and my cousins to take to our elementary school classrooms. This year I was able to carry on that tradition! I took 10 dozen sunflower and state cookies to work and shared them with faculty and staff. A few already knew that today was Kansas Day, but many did not so I had the opportunity to give some state history and tell them how my Grandma made these cookies for us when we were young. I handed them out in the morning and by the afternoon I heard people saying “happy Kansas day!” or “did you know today is Kansas day?”

In addition to giving our Bible blog a facelift, we also recently held a contest to get a new name. One was chosen, and Blogging the Bible has now become The Blog Testament! The new home is at www.blogtestament.com. Once there, you can still find all your favorite old posts (hopefully), and find links to all the wonderful resources we mention on the blog. Also, don’t forget to change the links to the RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader (like Google Reader).

Head on over to check it out!

If you are a first-time or repeat visitor, please stop by and sign our new guestbook. We’d love to hear where you’re from and what brought you by our site!

Thanks for reading!

Because the process of updating the Blogging the Bible site also broke our main blog page, I decided to bite the bullet and migrate our regular site over to a Wordpress blog as well. As with the other site, we’ll be going through old posts and fixing any broken links or images over time, and we will be slowly adding back photo and video galleries as well. We’ve also added an feature that will help you share our posts on Twitter or Facebook (and more), and my favorite new feature–an iPhone-formatted site! Just visit www.ryanandsamantha.info on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android phone to check it out!

NOTE: It’s possible that our RSS feed address has changed, so be sure to update that link in your favorite RSS reader.

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of the new site!

I’m growing a little weary of Blogger’s sloggish interface and customizability, so I have migrated the Blogging the Bible site over to a Wordpress blog. The look has been much improved, post categories and a tag cloud improve usability, and my new favorite feature–the Bookshelf! The Bookshelf is a page where we list all the books, bibles, study guides, movies, music, etc. that we mention in the posts.

Over the next several days, I will be going through old posts and fixing some broken links and images, but anything new should be no problem. Head over there and leave us a comment and tell us what you think!

We will probably eventually port this blog over to a Wordpress as well, but we’ll leave that for another weekend project.

Ever wonder where ABC got the crazy idea for the TV show The Bachelor? Check it out on our Blogging the Bible site!