December 2025

WORDS WITH A WISEGUY 22 ...

Hello! Thanks for signing up for the blog! If you want to read any of the previous blogs, I usually put them on my website (travelwithawiseguy.com) a couple weeks after I email them here. If you know anyone who might be interested, please have them email me (jwise@goshockers.com) to be added to the list. If you want removed from this list just reply to this email – no hard feelings!

I’M SELLING CALENDARS!

I’ve been toying with this idea for a couple years and I finally put it together. I’m selling a limited amount of 100 13-month wall calendars for $23 each (shipping included). I selected 26 of my favorites photos from my travels in 2025 – there were some tough decisions! Here is the link for ordering them. They could make a great Christmas gift! Thank you for your support!

Link: https://www.travelwithawiseguy.com/online-store-1

Since the writing of this, the calendars have sold out. 

THE LATEST …

I haven’t been sending this blog as often as I’d like, but I was waiting for the calendar info to come through before I sent a new one. The past couple of months have been mostly traveling locally/regionally and coaching track and field. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been a coach at Wichita State since 2006 so that requires me to be in Wichita most days during the school year. So when I have off time (usually weekends), I have about 48 hours to explore. So that limits me to within a few hours of driving from Wichita. I had a few more days off last week for Thanksgiving so I was able to go a little further and explored the Oklahoma Panhandle. This will be the final series of videos about “No Man’s Land” in Beaver County. I’ve really enjoyed exploring that area and I’ll have three more videos coming out in December. During the fall I’ve also gone to Pawnee County KS, Oklahoma City (twice), Fort Scott KS, and a little trip through SE Kansas, NW Arkansas, SW Missouri, and NE Oklahoma. Some of those videos have already been published, while others are coming soon!

NO MAN’S LAND THOUGHTS

I’m not exactly sure what has made the Oklahoma Panhandle so fascinating to me. Once I get done editing the three videos I filmed last week, that will make 13 videos total of the three counties that make up what used to be No Man’s Land OK. I think some of it is the unique history of there being “no laws”, but when you actually go to the area – especially way out on the backroads – you can see how harsh of an environment it must have been in the late 1800’s. Communities forgotten, buildings abandoned, long stretches of no signs of life … there’s a kind of simple beauty there. I’m glad I was able to document it, I hope you enjoyed it too!

WINTER BREAK

The end of the academic semester means I’ll have some time to explore beyond a few hours from Wichita. I’m still debating where I’m going to go. I know I’ll be visiting family around Christmas time, and my brother has booked a tour of “Underground Cincinnati” where we’ll get to explore a historic series of tunnels under the city. I am thinking of doing a “small town downtown” through my old stomping grounds as well. My debate has been: do I go east or west? If I go west I would probably aim for New Mexico and possibly visit Colorado and Texas as well. If I go east I will probably aim for Tennessee and include Arkansas and Kentucky. I’m leaning towards the east because I can swing up to Ohio easily and if I go west I’ll have to fly to Ohio and then back to resume where I left off (that’s what I did last year). But the SW will be warmer, and I like the sun :) We’ll see!

CHANNEL UPDATE

The channel has seemed to hit a new level of consistency in terms of views and new subscribers. We’re up to 66k total subscribers and haven’t had a day with less than 10k views in many months. Those are numbers I could only dream about a couple years ago. 2025 will definitely go down as the best year so far. Hopefully the momentum will continue in 2026, although I know of lots of channels that eventually level off and plateau. I try to do a variety of videos to keep you entertained, even if I’m confident a certain kind of video won’t be popular. For example, I enjoy visiting museums, and early on there wasn’t much interest in those videos. But lately it seems the museum videos have gone from getting 1k-2k views to 5k-10k views and some even higher. The Indiana Military Museum video I did this summer now has over 20k views and I thought it would be a very niche video. That’s great to see, because I have some really interesting museum videos coming up!

DEAD MALL VIDEO GOING VIRAL

You can’t predict which videos will be popular, and I never thought a video about a dead mall would be my most popular video. But here we are and a video I did about Muskogee, Oklahoma’s dead Arrowhead Mall is approaching a million views. As I send this it’s at 970k views and getting about 5k views per day. They call this having an “evergreen” video where it just keeps consistently going and going. I dreamed of videos getting a million views, but I thought it would be something like the 10 Smallest Towns in Texas (which is up to 634k). I’ve done 9 dead mall videos (with one more filmed and not released yet), and they range from Arrowhead Mall’s 970k down to Crystal City’s 7k. And honestly, I thought the Crystal City video would be very popular. YouTube has a way of teaching you to never fully understand how things work haha!

WANT EVEN MORE CONTENT? BECOME A MEMBER TODAY!

If you’re not aware, I also have a member section of the channel, where you can get extra content every week. We have a lot of fun with these videos, and the support goes a long way in helping the channel continue to grow! If you are interested you can learn more on my website: https://www.travelwithawiseguy.com/membership

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

Thanks for reading my ramblings!

If you enjoy my channel and want to help it grow, feel free to share videos to your friends and/or family! I also have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X (Instagram is probably the best to follow, links below). Oh yeah buy some merch! (but only if you want). Info for everything can be found on my website: https://www.travelwithawiseguy.com/

Thanks for all the support and we’ll see you down a backroad!

John Wise