I started my exploration of Kentucky this week by driving east along the Ohio river from Covington to Maysville. Along the way I made a quick stop in the tiny town of Augusta, where I got the warmest welcome into a place I could possible imagine in an old red caboose at the very end of Main Street. The caboose was the site of the town’s Welcome Center, and the welcome came from Ms. Dorothy who has been welcoming visitors to Augusta for the last 16 years. I love stopping into local Visitors Centers wherever I go. I get travel ideas from younger people through Yelp and TripAdvisor, but I love the Visitors Centers because I can usually find someone there from an older generation, someone with stories to tell about wherever I am.
"The Prettiest Town in Dixie" is a pretty big claim to make. Having traveled fairly extensively around the south in my life, I've seen some really beautiful towns. But this claim is certainly an enticing one and a bold one, so I had to go and see for myself. The town that made this claim? Tiny Cheraw, South Carolina. I got there first thing in the morning with the intention of staying maybe an hour or two, and ended up being there the better part of the day. It really is a beautiful town, steeped in history and with one of the best tourism infrastructures I've come across in a town this size anywhere. I came knowing almost nothing about Cheraw, and left charmed by it and knowing it's a place I will return to.
Southwestern West Virginia doesn’t get a lot of visitors. This is a shame because there are some really cool places to see there. But it’s a shame for them as well because jobs are scarce in the southwest since coal has dried up and the economy could use some tourist money coming in. During my time there I saw some wonderful tourism initiatives, some things I would change and some things that just left me shaking my head.
I started my tour in tiny Bramwell in Mercer County. Historically, Bramwell was the business center of the Pocahontas Coal Fields. During its heyday, Bramwell supported a population of over 4000 people. The Bank of Bramwell was the financial center for the whole region and 14 passenger trains a day pulled into the station. In the late 1800s, Bramwell was said to have the highest concentration of millionaires per capita in the country...
