Game Day Guide

Though college road trips used to mean penny-pinching, drive-all-night sojourns fueled by caffeine and junk food, Lawrence author Susan Kraus argues that grown-up road trips can offer just as much fun and adventure without the depriving you of sleep and nourishment.

In her Game Day Guide to Towns of the Big 12, Kraus offers convincing, comprehensive evidence that trips with the kids, college friends, or even a romantic getaway are possible in all the towns that belong to the region’s largest athletic conference. And, of course, these trips need not focus on watching football or basketball games.

Kraus is a longtime travel writer whose abiding sense of humor helps immensely in her other career as a marriage and family therapist and mediator. A former travel columnist for the Kansas City Star, she has written free-lance stories for publications nationwide for 20 years. She says she tackled the Game Day Guide because she couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been done, and she loves to poke around college towns. “I’ve never met a college town I didn’t like,” she declares.

In each town’s section, Kraus discusses history, hotels, restaurants, coffeehouses and ice cream, nightlife, shopping, museums and galleries, activities for kids, parks and trails, golf and other sports offerings, the Game Day ritual, and ideas for other day trips nearby.

She takes care to cover the local favorites in each town, avoiding the sameness of national chains and urging her readers to take a few risks while supporting local traditions and business owners. Although she was assisted by a team of researchers and received much additional help from local convention and visitors bureaus, she personally traveled to all 12 towns in seven states (“gaining 20 pounds in the process,” she jokes.”

Now that she has covered her home region, Kraus anticipates similar guides for the SEC, ACC and Big Ten.

For more information or to purchase the book, visit www.gamedayguide.com