Photography Ryan Coody
A Wichita track and field coach has won an online following by creating videos of slow-travel tours through less populated towns in Kansas and across the nation
John Wise stops the car and gets out in what is technically Pleasanton, just off Highway 69 in the southeast corner of the state.
But to get to this exact spot of Pleasanton, he had to drive about seven miles north of the main part of town, exit east to Kansas 52, and then go back south on Valley Road for about a mile.
This is the part of Pleasanton that isn’t as easily accessed. It’s the old, historic part of the city with a trading post, a museum, and nobody else around.
It’s exactly John Wise’s type of place.
For the past four years, this Wichita resident has been traveling around Kansas and other states to film ghost towns, nearly lost towns, rural communities and other attractions off the main roads. He began his journeys to fill his spare time during the pandemic but continues them as a YouTube tour guide with more than 26,000 subscribers to his “Travel with a Wise Guy” channel of over 365 videos.
Working with his phone, a drone, and—only recently—a Go-Pro camera, Wise creates low-key videos where he brings viewers along to explore remains of once-bustling towns or walk the streets of small communities. Sometimes, he’ll visit with a local or tour a site, sharing what he learns about the location.
“I don’t claim to be an expert,” Wise explains. “I’m more of a fan of where I’m going.”
Wise says his affinity for exploring rural areas is rooted in growing up in Winchester, Ohio, a place unfamiliar to most people. He usually explains it as a small farm area in southwestern Ohio, 45 miles east of Cincinnati, close to the Kentucky border. Like many of the small communities that Wise now likes to visit, Winchester is a town where Google street view decided it didn’t need to run its camera car for long. The street view map shows only Main Street, Tri-County Road, and a few other outlets that box in the Family Dollar store and the Presbyterian church.
Wise remained in Ohio for the first 30 years of his life, first as a student and then as a track coach before he took a job with Wichita State University, where he continues as the university’s associate director of track and field. That’s a job that requires a lot of travel for recruitment and competition, travel that Wise says he didn’t realize he valued so much until the 2020 lockdown canceled all his trips.
“You get used to a rhythm of traveling when you’ve done it for decades,” Wise explains, “so I had to get out.”
So he took his own trips, taking videos with his camera phone. Soon, he realized he was building an entire YouTube channel around them and packaging some of his trips into themes. He created the video “10 Smallest Towns in Kansas” over the course of a weekend, and his channel immediately grew in popularity. The video featured communities such as Hollenberg, located near an original stop on the Pony Express, Frederick, which has a fascinating history of surprising dissolution challenges, and the smallest town, Waldron, with an official population of 9, according to the 2020 census. The film was invited to the No Coast Film Fest in Emporia and was designated an “Official Selection.”
“It was just for fun and for something to do,” Wise explains. “I don’t make videos to chase audiences, but when you make videos about small towns and ghost towns or rural places, you gradually gain fans of the genre. You pick up followers who used to live there or had a grandfather or ancestors who used to live there. You begin to see people with connections to the area leaving comments on your videos.”
If you watch one of John Wise’s tour videos, the YouTube algorithms will provide you with suggestions for similar videos across America or even the globe. There’s an entire genre of these solo or couples’ travel vlogs similar to Wise’s low-key approach.
“YouTube has super-popular, highly produced videos by teams that are producing what is basically a show,” Wise notes, “and then there are people like me who are doing it without much fanfare—those are the ones I like. They usually talk about history, geography, and they’re amateur—but not in a negative way. They’re just not big-budget productions. I think those videos are often very popular because they are authentic.”
Wise says part of his authenticity is not to plan too much for a trip. He will map out where he is going, but he leaves room for random stops, exploration, and being surprised by what he finds.
“I have to prepare hotel stops ahead of time for long trips,” Wise says, “but I try to come into an area, read about it while I’m there and then read again after I have explored the area. I like discovering stuff and not being overly prepared.”
Sometimes, Wise’s tours are shaped by his encounters. He might run into local residents who are excited to hear about his project and go above and beyond to make sure he has everything he needs to share their town’s story. In his video on Mildred, Wise was invited to join the monthly community dance. Here, traveling through Linn County and stopping at Pleasanton, the director of the Trading Post museum welcomes Wise and gives him a tour of the property, passionately delving into the details of the town’s past and sharing hopeful plans for the future.
“The people I meet are as good and nice as anywhere,” Wise explains after the trip. “They are very welcoming and proud of their communities, but maybe aren’t self-promoting. Maybe some towns miss out on a lot of visitors because they aren’t self-promoting, but that is also part of the charm of those towns—they are authentic.”
A Wise Guy Primer
John Wise has more than 365 travel videos, with at least 70 devoted exclusively to Kansas locations. Here’s a suggestion for five John Wise videos to begin your virtual travels with him. Go online to youtube.com/@TravelwithaWiseguy, then enter these titles into the channel search bar.
- “10 Smallest Towns of Kansas” – The weekend road trip video that started Wise’s popularity.
- “US 166: The Route 66 Spur, Part Two” – A recent video where Wise travels 164 miles along Route 66’s less-famous sister, along the southeastern border of Kansas from Coffeyville to South Haven
- “14 Kansas Ghost Towns: Greenwood County, Part One” – An exploration of the east-central Kansas county that grew from an oil boom and then steadily lost population and communities to the present day.
- “US Road Trip 50, Days 2–3: Western Kansas” – Following US Highway 50 out to California, Wise spends two days on the road from Newton to Coolidge with stops at locations such as Kinsley, whose signpost proclaims it is 1,561 miles from San Francisco and 1,561 miles from New York City.
- “10 Smallest Towns in Texas” – Wise’s road trip to the 10 smallest incorporated towns of Texas includes trips to the nearly abandoned desert landscape of the southwestern Texas town of Toyah to the wave-soaked Gulf of Mexico shoreline of Quintana that lost out to nearby Galveston in becoming a large port city.
