For 21 years, Bob and Jen Westerfield from Spingboro, Ohio, have chosen their vacation destination based on a dart tossed at a map. This year, the dart landed on Great Bend, Kansas.

The Westerfields were downtown Thursday morning with a list of things they planned to explore.

They bought a “My Town Great Bend” apron with the Perk’s coffee shop logo. At the Heart of Kansas Mercantile, they made friends with the sisters who run the store, Shelley Carson and Leslie Mingenback. Soon they were drinking lattes at Perks while Mark Mingenback, Leslie’s husband, arrived and showed them the adjoining hallway to the historic Zarah Hotel, soon to feature loft apartments currently under construction.

The old hotel elevator shaft has been approved to use again but until a new elevator is installed the remnants of the original remain – including a woman’s high-heeled shoe on the floor.

“What was the story behind that?” the Westerfields wondered, with Jen thinking of the Aerosmith song “Love in an Elevator.” They returned to Perks to tell their story to the Great Bend Tribune.

The annual trips started two years before the couple married in 2006. 

“I made a statement to Jen that I’d never been anywhere I didn’t like,” Bob said. “I could throw a dart and go there and love it.”

For Christmas in 2003, Jen gave him a dart and a spinning map she made from a lazy susan apparatus, cork and adhesive she purchased at Home Depot. That year they hung up the map and he threw the dart, landing in Marsh Island, Louisiana.

The trip was a success so they did it again the following year, when the dart took them to Happy, Texas. From that time on, it was an annual tradition, continuing as they married and went on to have three children. The kids stayed home for this vacation because they are busy with sports and school.

They take turns throwing the dart on Jan. 1. A coin toss determines who will put on a blindfold and throw the dart. If it lands in their home state of Ohio or any state they’ve already visited for their Dart Vacation, they throw again. A more recent rule is that the destination should be a town that is at least big enough to have a high school. One year their dart landed on Two Buttes, Colorado, population “about 50.” That was also a good trip even though there weren’t many locals to meet.

Bob said they do a little research before they arrive at their destinations and they learn a lot more from the townspeople.

They created a blog at DartAmericaByChance.com that can be found online, although it hasn’t been updated for a few years. From time to time, a local reporter interviews the Westerfields, as the Great Bend Tribune did this week, which is how they were discovered by ABC and Fox News. They ended up flying to New York in 2012 to appear on Fox & Friends. The segment was called “Destination Dart” or “Ready, Aim, Vacation.”

Fox and Friends asked the Westerfields to throw a dart during the show, but they’d already thrown their 2012 dart back on Jan. 1. So they gave a Florida vacation to a couple they’d met on their 2011 trip to Yuma, Arizona. That couple gave them dune buggy rides in the Arizona desert and the Westerfields treated them to Disneyworld and other Florida attractions.

When they prepared to visit Great Bend, Jen was excited because they have relatives in Kansas City and she has cousins in Garden City. They timed their trip so they could attend the Chiefs/Bengals football game at Arrowhead Stadium on Sept. 15.

The game didn’t go the way they wanted, with the Chiefs winning by one point at the last second, but Bob said the KC fans were “over-the-top friendly.” They loved their other stops, visiting Wichita and driving through small towns until they got to the salt mine museum at Hutchinson and eventually Great Bend. They planned to visit Cheyenne Bottoms, the Great Bend Brit-Spaugh Zoo, the Barton County Historical Society Village and Museum and the Great Bend Airport Airfest, where Bob had a ride booked on the B-29 “Doc” for Friday.