United States
Outer Banks
Wild horses roam a sandbar where two thousand ships lie wrecked beneath the surf.
Sand blows across Route 12 in thin sheets where the Outer Banks stretch between the open Atlantic and the flat, warm Pamlico Sound. North of the last paved road, wild Banker horses pick their way along a beach that has swallowed more ships than any other stretch of the American coast.
This two-hundred-mile chain of barrier islands earned the name Graveyard of the Atlantic: more than 2,000 wrecks lie off the North Carolina coast, driven onto the shifting sandbars of Diamond Shoals by storms and war. The Wright brothers chose Kill Devil Hills for its steady winds, and the dune where powered flight began in 1903 is still there to walk. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest in the United States, was picked up and moved 2,900 feet inland in 1999 to save it from the encroaching sea. At the northern end, the Corolla wild horses, Colonial Spanish Bankers designated North Carolina's state horse, live on beaches reached only by four-wheel drive.
Family
Children can climb a lighthouse, stand where the first aeroplane lifted off and watch wild horses from the truck on a four-wheel-drive beach, all in one salt-scoured day.
Couple
The stretches between Hatteras and Ocracoke feel genuinely remote, and the ferry to Ocracoke ends at a village where fig trees shade the yards.
Friends
Kiteboarding on the sound, wreck dives on the Graveyard of the Atlantic and 4WD expeditions to the wild herd give a group a different adrenaline hit each day.
- More than 2,000 ships have wrecked off these islands, sunk by the shifting sandbars of Diamond Shoals; divers still work the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
- The Corolla wild horses, Colonial Spanish Bankers and North Carolina's state horse, roam beaches north of the paved road reached only by four-wheel drive.
- Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest in the United States, was moved 2,900 feet inland in 1999 to escape the eroding shoreline.
- The dune at Kill Devil Hills where the Wright brothers flew in 1903 chose itself: the same steady coastal winds still blow across it.
Hatteras-style clam chowder, a clear broth of clams, bacon, onion and potato that islanders have made for two centuries.
Ocracoke fig cake, baked from the preserves of fig trees that have stood in island yards for generations.
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Kerama Islands
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Mount Rainier
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A volcanic cone draped in more glaciers than any peak in the contiguous United States.