Outer Banks

The Outer Banks is a roughly 200-mile chain of narrow barrier islands off North Carolina's coast, separated from the mainland by wide sounds and connected to each other by a mix of bridges and, in places, nothing but a ferry ride. That isolation is part of the appeal — even the most developed parts of the islands stay narrow enough that the ocean and the sound are often both visible from the same road.

The islands hold a genuinely significant piece of aviation history. Orville and Wilbur Wright chose Kitty Hawk and the nearby dune at Kill Devil Hills for their flight experiments specifically because of the area's strong, steady, predictable winds and soft sand for landing, and on December 17, 1903, they completed the first sustained, controlled flights of a powered aircraft there. The Wright Brothers National Memorial now marks the exact spot, with granite markers showing how far each of that day's four flights traveled.

Netflix borrowed the Outer Banks name and general coastal, small-town setting for its teen-drama series, but the show is actually filmed almost entirely around Charleston, South Carolina, standing in for the fictional island of Kildare — a detail that surprises a lot of visitors who arrive expecting to recognize specific filming locations from the show.

Further north, a protected herd of wild Spanish mustangs roams the beaches around Corolla, descendants of horses brought by Spanish colonists centuries ago that have run wild on these islands ever since. The area they inhabit has no paved roads, reachable only by four-wheel-drive vehicle, which has helped keep the herd's habitat largely undeveloped.

The waters offshore have earned the islands a grimmer nickname: the Graveyard of the Atlantic, a reference to the shifting sandbars and unpredictable currents, where the Gulf Stream's warm water meets colder coastal currents, that have wrecked an estimated 5,000 or more ships over the centuries. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States, was built in 1870 partly to warn ships away from this exact danger, and was itself relocated nearly 3,000 feet inland in 1999 to escape the same coastal erosion that has claimed so many vessels.