Chicago to Kansas

[dr. kenneth noisewater]

1) lawrence - good local music, good college sports (esp ku basketball), cool people, kinda bohemian (though more yuppies move in every day), just a really cool atmosphere.

2) kansas city area - don't know how much smaller of a city you want, but if you still want a major city, this is as good as it gets in kansas. kck can be very dangerous if you're in the wrong place (somebody gets shot or robbed daily) and johnson county (joco) is for upper-middle-class types (suburbia). the missouri side has cheaper housing and i would recommend a place like maybe grain valley or lee's summit or the area around the south end of the i-435. westport is fun to go party in, but that area has some of the most expensive rents in the city.

3) manhattan - manhappenin'! the little apple has k-state, which means more rednecks and less hippies than ku, but this town still has some cool people and aggieville to party in, and the surrounding flint hills are pretty sweet too.

i haven't spent a lot of time in wichita, so i'll let others give the pros and cons. emporia has a division 2 university and is only about 90-120 minutes away from kc, but is smaller than both larryville and manhappenin'. salina and hays are 2 and 1/2 hours and 4 hours away from kc, respectively, so if you want some isolation, check them out. salina has a branch of k-state, but is not really a university town. hays does have a university similar in size to emporia, but it's smaller than salina and doesn't have as much shopping. salina is also only 90 minutes away from wichita. i haven't heard a lot of good things about topeka, the capital and 3rd largest city, which is only an hour west of kc but reportedly has crime problems.

just depends on what you want, i s'pose. good luck to ya.

[TinaMcG]

We relocated from Chicago to Kansas last spring. We live in south Johnson County. I've gone on day trips to Lawrence and I just love it. It is nothing like rural JoCo where we live, and it's nothing like Overland Park or Olathe, either. It's a bustling town, and you have to travel to thelimits of it to find strip malls. The city itself is full of independent businesses. I'm in my late 50s and I find the college town atmosphere really stimulating. If I could talk my husband into it, and if the housing market were healthy, I'd move to Lawrence in a heartbeat.

[wesgonnawin]

Hey I moved from the Chicago area down here to Kansas in 1990 I live in a small town called Lyons, Ks. Although when I first came here I planted myself in Hutchinson, Kansas. It is a nice town, has Hutchinson Community College, has a population of about 50,000 people. So not too big and not too small. in 97 I moved to Lyons. Look up Hutchinson, Kansas and see what you think.