Can Waynesboro be a tourist destination?

Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
  

Waynesboro doesn’t have a facility like The Biltmore to pull people down off the Blue Ridge Parkway like Asheville, N.C., has. But what if it did?

Consider that between 2 and 3 million visitors go in and out of the Shenandoah National Park each year, and 20 million people travel the Blue Ridge Parkway each year.

“When you consider that you’re strategically located between those two, that’s something that no other community can boast. No one else can say that they are located in between those two huge tourism assets. That’s tremendous untapped potential there,” said Brian Ososky, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Travel Association, which coordinates tourism-marketing efforts for localities from the Roanoke Valley to the Winchester area.

Waynesboro is perhaps the best situated from a tourism-marketing standpoint of any locality in the Valley. We are literally at Milepost Zero, the entrance both to the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs south and the Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah National Park that runs to the north. Continue reading “Can Waynesboro be a tourist destination?” »