I’m Going to Mongolia Next Month. The Kansas Sky Has Been Preparing Me.
🌸 Whimsy Atlas + ☕ Cool Girl City
There’s something the Kansas sky does that I’ve never been able to explain to people who haven’t seen it.
It doesn’t end. That’s the only way I can describe it.
You don’t really notice it until someone from somewhere else points it out. Then suddenly you can’t stop seeing it. The horizon stretches so far that the sky becomes part of the landscape itself, and for a moment, the rest of the world feels wonderfully small.
I’ve lived in other places. I’ve traveled to a lot of them. I know what it feels like when a view is beautiful.
This is something different.
The Kansas sky doesn’t feel beautiful so much as it feels enormous in a way that makes you aware, briefly, of how small you are. And somehow that’s okay.
I found out recently that Mongolia does the same thing.
I’ve been deep in research mode since booking this trip, and every description of the Mongolian steppe keeps returning to the same words: vast, open, endless, sky.
The steppe stretches farther than my brain can really picture-rolling grasslands, long stretches without trees, and a horizon so low it almost feels like a rumor.
I kept reading and thinking the same thing.
I know this feeling.
I’ve felt it before in Kansas.
The more I researched, the stranger and more wonderful the parallels became. Both places have a deep relationship with the horse. Both celebrate traditions rooted in the land. Though their histories couldn’t be more different, both landscapes seem to inspire the same instinct, to slow down, to look outward, and to measure yourself against an enormous horizon.
Naadam, Mongolia’s national festival, is what I’m traveling there to experience in July. Wrestling. Archery. Horse racing. Traditions that have been passed from one generation to the next for centuries.
I can’t help thinking about what that feeling rhymes with back home.
I moved away from Kansas City twice.
Once to South Korea in 2011, straight out of college, chasing the world the way you do when you’re twenty two and convinced the life you want is somewhere you haven’t been yet.
Then Chicago in 2017.
Both times I came home expecting Kansas to feel exactly as I’d left it.
I don’t know if Kansas City changed as much as my eyes did.
The city certainly grew while I was gone. Like a lot of mid-sized cities, it became more global, more diverse, and more layered over the years. But travel had changed me, too. It taught me to notice cultures, neighborhoods, little rituals, and the quiet ways a place tells you who it is.
When I came home, I realized those stories had been here all along.
I just hadn’t learned how to see them yet.
I think about the drives west across Kansas.
The farther you get from the city, the fewer buildings compete with the horizon. The sky slowly takes over until it feels bigger than the road beneath you. Storm clouds build for miles before they ever arrive. Sunsets seem to stretch on forever.
I’ve made those drives more times than I can count.
Now I wonder if they were preparing me for a place I’d spend decades dreaming about without even knowing it.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because Mongolia feels like a version of that lesson in reverse.
I’m not leaving to find somewhere more interesting.
I’m leaving with the quiet confidence that home has already taught me how to notice things.
Kansas taught me to pay attention to space. To weather. To horizons. To the feeling of standing somewhere that reminds you how wonderfully small you are.
Maybe that’s exactly what Mongolia is going to ask of me.
I leave in a little over a week.
I don’t know exactly what I’ll find.
But I have a feeling that when I’m standing on the Mongolian steppe watching horses race across a valley that seems to go on forever, something in me is going to recognize it.
And I’ll think about Kansas.
Maybe that’s what travel has been teaching me all along.
Not to escape home.
But to understand it better.
Explore the themes of this post:
🌸 Whimsy Atlas
Places that stay with you.
Whimsy Atlas is where I chase wonder. From breathtaking landscapes and unexpected moments of delight, these stories celebrate the places that make me stop, look closer, and remember why I love exploring the world.
Browse the Whimsy Atlas collection →
☕ Cool Girl City
Cities are more than attractions.
Cool Girl City follows the small discoveries, neighborhood moments, café visits, unexpected conversations, and everyday adventures that make a place memorable. These stories are about how a city feels when you slow down and pay attention.
