What is Wandermore Publishing?

Wandermore Publishing LLC is a publishing company that creates books and posts content to encourage individuals to go out and explore their home states. Traveler and author Seth Varner works to document town history through his writings and photographs, learn more about local communities, and encourage the expansion of small town tourism. The books serves as a travel guide, history book, and living photo album all-in-one!

THE HISTORY OF WANDERMORE:

Who doesn’t love a good road trip? While in broader terms we may think of them as a half-country haul to the Grand Canyon or a car ride to the sandy white beaches of Florida, in reality, we take our own miniature “road trips” every day. Whether it’s a morning cross-city commute, picking up a prescription from the local pharmacy, or driving down to grandma and grandpa’s house for the weekend, we’re constantly hitting the road to visit somewhere. 

I’m a bit of a road tripper myself, but I like to take things to the extreme. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of traveling to every incorporated town in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and Kansas. By my count, that’s 2,407+ communities I’ve had the pleasure of exploring, despite the constantly changing number of new incorporations and disincorporation of old railroad and mining towns. Whenever an opportunity arises to hit the road with friends or family, I hit the road and seek out what makes whatever region of the country I’m in stand out. In 2023 alone, I wiped my schedule clean for friends trips to Denver, CO, Washington D.C., Memphis, TN, Oxford, MS, and Branson, MO, dates with my girlfriend to Des Moines, IA, Newton and Pella, IA, Waco, TX and Oklahoma City, OK, sporting events in Minneapolis, MN and Kansas City, MO, and a mega-family road trip to Grand Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Horseshoe Bend, and Durango and Georgetown, CO. In between all those excursions, I took on my fourth Wandermore project visiting every one of Kansas’s 625+ incorporated towns. 

I’ve got a constant travel bug. No matter the occasion, I’m always on the lookout for another reason to hit the road. It’s a blast traveling from city to city to take in historical sites like the monuments of D.C. and the National Civil Rights Museum and marvel at the beautiful National Parks of the western portion of the country, but sometimes, I like to put my tourist hat and sunglasses away and travel for a different reason. To do something deeper and more meaningful. After sixty-odd days of traveling to every nook and cranny of Kansas, I was able to document every municipality through nearly 50,000 photographs, from the sprawling cityscapes of the Kansas City metro to the towns with a population in the single digits. I made an effort to explore the history, architecture, cuisine, and all the other quirky attractions that made every town stand out in its own way.

A lot of people are baffled by how I came up with the idea to visit every town in a state. You’d think it’s not exactly the kind of idea that somebody comes up with without some sort of backstory or long-winded explanation. And to that, my friend, you think correctly! It all started with the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. We all know how that went. Life is good and normal, and within a week the world came crashing down. Workplaces ushered employees out the doors, as did schools and universities, and everyone was sent home as the world struggled to learn how to deal with a modern-day pandemic. At that time, I was a 19-year-old freshman in college at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I worked for the Omaha Athletics department taking stats for the basketball, hockey, and soccer teams, and I was attending in-person classes and living on campus. One day I was sitting in class learning about volcanoes, and watching the NBA on television, and the next, I was told I was being required to move back in with my parents in my hometown of Wahoo, Nebraska.

For a month or so, I worked at the local Dairy Queen and attended my classes on Zoom. I played basketball and video games with my high school buddy Austin, who had also been sent home from Concordia University in Seward because of pandemic mandates. We were fine for a while, playing games and cruising main, but quarantine began to take its toll on us. Boredom started creeping in as we realized there wasn’t much to do in a world where businesses were closed, and public gatherings of any degree weren’t allowed. In a time where travel was limited, everything was closed, and making connections with next to impossible, I had the urge to make a something-out-of-nothing summer and do something that (to my knowledge then) nobody had done before: “Hey Austin, want to visit every town in Nebraska this summer?” 

The idea spurred from some core memories I had as a child. Circa 2009, when I was about nine years old, my father Dave began to work on a family tree project. In addition to your typical family tree information like birthdays, names, and the like, he wanted to expand his project to include photographs of the headstones of deceased relatives, the churches they had attended, and the homes they lived in. He recruited little ole’ me and his mother to accompany him on a series of road trips throughout Butler and Seward County, Nebraska so he took take some up-to-date photos of the sites. While he photographed points of family interest, I had an agenda of my own. Equipped with my disposable Wal-Mart camera, I took photos of the things that interested me: primarily population signs, and sites like the Baloney Shop of Malmo or the green Wal-Mart in York. Things that captured the attention of a third-grader, you know, the important stuff! Around the same time, my mother Leigh instilled a love for traveling in me by taking my brother and I on a trip to the Caribbean, where I first began to understand that there was an entire world to explore outside of the little bubble of Wahoo. As my dad finished up the family tree project, we stopped our road trips. I remember pouring over a map of Nebraska on our way home from one trip and asking dad, “can we visit every town in Nebraska?” To which I likely got a chuckle and a “maybe someday, Seth” response.

The thought to visit all of Nebraska’s communities must’ve stuck in the back of my mind, but my obsession with traveling, geography, and writing was more profound. In third grade, I started writing books about “Fluffy the Kitten,” the adventures of my favorite farm cat who went on adventures and loved spending time with his friends. One such rendition of the fifteen-book series was “Fluffy the Kitten Travels the World,” in which Fluffy flew his plane to all corners of the world to take in world’s most famous points of interest. My classmates Eli and Marcela (now the owner of the small business Kookaburra Cookies in the Omaha area, and an English teacher at my alma mater high school, respectively) drew the pictures for my books and helped my present them to my classmates at the time. As I continued to see the world through our family vacations, I became more enthralled with geography and travel, and in the fifth grade I launched my then-second website, “SVGeography.” I compiled articles, photos, and videos from around the web, and my teacher Mrs. Simons would incorporate them in her lesson plans when applicable. By the time I was fifteen, I was in charge of planning our first true family road trip to Oklahoma City and Kansas City, a responsibility that I have maintained throughout the years as we’ve made our way to places like the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the Wisconsin Dells, and the aforementioned adventure to the Grand Canyon and the American West. All things considered, I think it’s easy to see how my interests as a child have influenced my career choice of being a traveler and a writer, and how a few little trips around my dad’s stomping grounds turned into the ambition to start the pioneer Wandermore project around Nebraska. 

On April 22, 2020, Austin and I began our two-and-half month trek across the Cornhusker State. We didn’t travel continuously though. We’d go out for a day and visit a handful of towns but return to Wahoo to work at Dairy Queen for a few more. It became a weekly thing where every four to eight days or so we’d hit the road for the day but come back home to sleep in our own beds. Honestly, for the first few weeks of traveling, the project wasn’t very serious. We’d visit the towns and take our selfie with something that said the town name on it—typically the welcome sign—and continue to the next community. Sometimes we’d stop for fast food or wander the town a little bit, but we weren’t taking pictures, meeting with people (as we didn’t yet then know much about COVID), or touring businesses, restaurants, or museums. The point of the trips then was solely for our enjoyment of getting out of the house and to have a little fun at the welcome signs by making a funny pose with our Energizer bunny, a little pink plush rabbit that Austin’s mom thought we should have tag along as our “mascot.” At the end of our trip, we planned to hand over the photos to our moms so they could scrapbook our travels, and that would be that.

I didn’t tell my parents about the first few trips. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be too pleased with my idea to visit every town in the state amid an ongoing pandemic. But as Austin and I kept disappearing with our friends for entire days at a time, I eventually broke the news to them about fifty towns into the project. It took a little convincing, but after I insisted that we were playing things safe and mostly keeping to ourselves, they ended up being okay with it. It was my mom who came up with the idea that I should begin sharing my photos to Facebook. I had started an Instagram page for our friends, but she thought that we’d reach more people if we shared our travels on the larger platform. 

She couldn’t have been more correct! Within a couple of weeks of starting the Facebook page, we began receiving interview requests from television and radio stations, and every small-town newspaper out there. We couldn’t believe it. Within the first month we had already gained well over ten-thousand followers, and the comments, likes, and messages came pouring in. It was in that moment that I recognized that the project could be a lot more than just a scrapbook adventure, and so I embraced the attention and started to incorporate the suggestions of followers into trips and start meeting people.

As the months progressed and we continued to hear stories from locals of their favorite memories of town and what seeing our few photos (at this time we only took a few since Instagram only allowed us to share ten in a single post) meant to them, a theme came to light. No matter how big or small the community, its residents of past and present were eager to show their hometown pride and make it known to the world  what their community was known for. Austin and I saw this theme unfold as well as we continued our trek around Nebraska: that there’s something to do in every town, but you’ve got to go out and find it. A great example that brings this principle to light is our visit to Monowi, population one. It’s the smallest incorporated town in the United States, with Elsie being the sole resident, mayor, bartender, and librarian. Even in this community of one, we were able to keep ourselves busy. We ate at the bar and talked with Elsie about her life and her memories of the town that once was. She showed us Rudy’s Library, a collection of thousands of books of her late husband, and an old church in which she was one of the last people in attendance. What many would hardly consider to be a dot on the map was in reality a several-hour adventure that took us through the life cycle of small farming town. Even if a town had a population of 50 people, 500 people, or 5,000 people, we discovered the truth that there was always something to learn, something to do, or something to explore. 

We amassed a following of 21,000 individuals by the conclusion of our trip around Nebraska and finished off our journey in our hometown on July 17, 2020, with a small parade and a celebration. In attendance was Nebraska Stories, a public television series that showcased clips and photos from our adventure around Nebraska, two other news stations, and a couple hundred people from the community. It was a wonderful sendoff for an incredible accomplishment. As I read through the Facebook comments on our final town post, I saw that several people were calling for our adventure to be documented in a coffee table book, so people could relive the journey over again and again. I gave it some thought and decided that I would give it a go. I worked day and night throughout the fall of my sophomore year of college to compile a book that featured photos and some brief information about every incorporated town in Nebraska. I went into detail about the things my friends and I saw, heard, and tasted throughout our two-and-a-half-month escapade, shared historical facts and tidbits, and created a living photo album feature by using QR codes. I knew the feature would come in handy down the road, because as I traveled Nebraska, I would be able add more photos of community buildings, or inside looks at museums and restaurants as I continued my travels. Since then, thousands of photos have been added to the living albums, and those who purchased the books in 2020 are able to see where else I’ve been to in Nebraska in 2021, 2022, and 2023 since the conclusion of the Visit531Nebraska project. The book, a complete afterthought of a project that was supposed to be a way to avoid boredom during a global pandemic, has evolved in the subsequent years to hold information on restaurants, lodging, festivals, recreation parks and areas, museums, and more.

The book “Visit531Nebrasla: Our Journey to Every Incorporated Town in the State,” was an incredible success. I’ll never forget the feeling of having to take loans from my family members and pouring my life savings into buying the inventory, or the joy I felt when I held a copy of my published work for the very first time that November. After hundreds of hours of planning, writing, and traveling, I had managed to self-publish a book and completed the project of a lifetime. As most reading this already know, the adventure didn’t end there either. It was only just beginning. 

In March of 2021, I decided to conduct a similar project called “Visit939Iowa” across the Mighty Mo’ and visit every one of Iowa’s incorporated communities. Austin joined me on these escapades as well, but this time, I made it known to Iowans that it was my intentions to create a book on Iowa at the conclusion of my travels. Much to my surprise, the people of Iowa rallied around the project, and we were met with an equal amount of hospitality and support. I took more photos, met more people, ate at more local eateries, and checked out more sites. Towards the end of the journey, I had taken on somewhat of a documentation mindset when I realized that people wanted to see everything that was left in a town. Instead of focusing on solely on notable sites like restaurants, historical markers, and downtown areas, by the end of the project in September I was trying to capture older buildings or even sites like repair shops and city parks. In September, our travels concluded, and I had the book ready to go by November. After another successful trip, the idea cemented in my mind that these projects could become a full-time career.

As I got deeper into my business classes in the Fall of 2021, it dawned on me that if I needed to make the business look more professional if I were going to pursue it as a full-time endeavor. The company was then just called “Visit531Nebraska,” but people were confused why a business with that name had visited every town in Iowa and written a book about both states. I needed to change the name. I loved the term wanderlust but found it overused, and I kept thinking on a play on words that could showcase what I was trying to do. I wondered. And my thoughts wandered. And they wandered some more. And, thirty minutes into my first brainstorming session in the shower, it came to me: Wandermore Publishing, a book-publishing company whose guides combine travel with history to encourage people to go out and explore their home states throughout the Midwest. I revamped the website, set up the company, printed the business cards, and thus Wandermore Publishing was born. 

The “Wandermore’s Visit310SouthDakota” project was put into action in February of 2022, and this time, I would be accompanied to every community by my college friend Jack. This was the first trip in which I embraced the documentation mindset and began to spend extra time on the road to capture more photos per town than I had in even in Nebraska or Iowa. In the smaller towns I made sure to take several laps to ensure that I didn’t miss churches or other buildings on the outskirts, and in the larger communities, I focused on capturing as many of the “big ticket” buildings and attractions that I could. The project lasted about four months, and it was then that I had come up with the idea to start the Wandermore Travel Fund to allow people to contribute funds in exchange for having the names of their friends, family, loved ones, pets and businesses placed in the back of a book. Still being in college at the time, the extra funds allowed Jack and I to spend more time on the road as I put together the photos and information for my third book. It was released in August of 2022.   

Looking back, it’s funny to see how a person’s career can develop out of their childhood interests in hobbies. For a kid who was writing books about his cat, loved traveling and taking photos at a young age, and who always took an interest in geography and history, it seems like Wandermore Publishing would’ve come to fruition at one point or another. Maybe it’s easy to say that now that COVID is largely a thing of the past, but without that pandemic, who knows if I would have ever had the intention to “wander more” and learn more about Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota and all the other little farm towns of the Midwest.

The ”Wandermore in Kansas” book released in November 2023 is a culmination of my efforts for what was the most comprehensive Wandermore project of the four. After finishing Nebraska and traveling east to Iowa and north to South Dakota, it only made sense to look south and take on the Sunflower State. After 17,000+ miles on the road and over eight months of traveling, writing, and research, I successfully visited every one of Kansas’s incorporated communities and snapped 50,000+ photos—more pictures than I’ve taken in any other state by a landslide. This was the first state in which I was able to focus nearly one hundred percent of my attention because until then, I had always had to work another job and be in school. I remained proactive in my studies from February through May of 2023, when I graduated with my degree in Business Administration, Marketing, and Management, and from thereon I was able to devote the entirety of my attention on this project. The extra time and freedom allowed me to meet with hundreds of people from all trades: convention and visitors bureaus, chambers of commerce, restaurant owners, attorneys, doctors, blue-collar and white-collar workers alike. I ate at nearly one-hundred local establishments around Kansas and toured over sixty museums. Had it not been for the support I received for the previous three states, and that of all those who followed along with the Kansas project and left their tips, history, anecdotes, memories, and kind words, the project would not have been able to reach the level of thoroughness that it did. I cannot thank all 129,000+ people that follow the four Facebook pages enough for all they’ve done to help me promote and expand small-town tourism and generate interest in their storied histories. 

My books serve as a testament to all the communities and the history that make our little Midwest communities so unique, and as a guide to exploring all aspects of tourism in each of them, no matter how big or small. I hope you will find my guides useful in discovering all that Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and Kansas have to offer. Thank you for helping me in my journey to promote small-town tourism and preserve the history of our little Midwestern communities.

In January 2024, I announced that I would commence traveling to my fifth state, North Dakota, beginning in the spring. Stay tuned!

Never stop wandering more! :)

Seth Varner

Be sure to keep up with all my travels and book updates by following the Wandermore network of Facebook pages (updated 1-2024):