Experience the best of Outer Banks

The Outer Banks are a long, thin chain of sandy barrier islands along the North Carolina coast, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Towns such as Kitty Hawk, Nags Head, Duck, Corolla and Hatteras sit among dunes and maritime forest, linked by a coastal road and by ferries to Ocracoke Island.

The Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills marks the spot where the first powered flight took place in 1903. Jockey's Ridge State Park has one of the tallest sand dunes on the east coast, and the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, striped black and white and the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States, was moved inland in 1999 to save it from the sea.

Wild horses, descended from Spanish mustangs, roam the northern beaches at Corolla, and offshore wrecks gave this coast its name, the Graveyard of the Atlantic. On Roanoke Island, a historic site recalls England's lost colony of the 1580s. Seafood is the main fare: shrimp, blue crab, oysters and hush puppies. Summer is the beach season, hurricanes can threaten in late summer, and the crowds thin out in autumn.