Outer Banks

The Outer Banks is a thin strip of barrier island — never more than a mile wide, sometimes less — running a hundred miles down the North Carolina coast before bending around Cape Hatteras and pointing south toward Ocracoke. The geography is extreme: Cape Hatteras sticks thirty miles into the Atlantic, a swell magnet where two ocean currents meet, the cold Labrador from the north and the warm Gulf Stream from the south. Everything that matters about the surf here follows from that fact. The east-facing beaches pick up long-period nor'easters in winter; the south-facing beaches catch tropical swells in summer; and when systems align in autumn, the S-Curves at Rodanthe produce the kind of barrels that end up on magazine covers.

The OBX is not a single place — it's five towns and several islands strung along one road, each with a different relationship to the water. Hatteras Island is where the serious surf is, low-slung and windswept, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore running the length of it. Duck, at the northern end, is quieter and wealthier, sitting between the Atlantic and Currituck Sound. Manteo sits on Roanoke Island between the barrier islands and the mainland, a waterfront town of galleries and seafood restaurants and a history that predates the United States. The hotels in this collection span all three.