About a Week
8 days · ~820 miles · from Norfolk
The Atlantic coast road end to end: NC 12 and two ferries across the sounds, then the Kings Highway from Wilmington to Savannah and the Golden Isles to the oldest city.
This trip chains: Outer Banks & the Sound Country · Kings Highway & the Lowcountry · Golden Isles & the First Coast
Starting in Norfolk, this 8-day itinerary connects Outer Banks & the Sound Country and Kings Highway & the Lowcountry and Golden Isles & the First Coast. It suits travellers interested in parks, coast, mountains & water; barbecue, boudin, oysters & tamales; battlefields, the movement & the past. The day-by-day bases let you split roughly 820 miles into a sequence of visits rather than trying to cover every linked route end to end. Use the daily highlights to decide which places deserve your longest stops.
Budget an average of about 103 miles per day across the whole trip, or roughly 2.3–3.4 hours behind the wheel at an assumed 30–45 mph back-roads pace. This is a planning estimate, not a measured time for each leg: transfer days can be longer and rest days shorter. Add meal stops, tours, ferries, traffic and hikes separately; use each day's navigation link for current driving estimates.
Use these day-end areas to plan lodging; the map pins are orientation points, not hotel recommendations. The final day can be your departure day.
Choose your dates around the experiences below rather than assuming one season fits the entire trip. These notes come from the linked route guides; check current forecasts and official schedules.
US 17 along the Dismal Swamp Canal, where the welcome center doubles as a boat dock and the water really is that color. Elizabeth City, then east across the sound to Roanoke Island: Fort Raleigh, the Lost Colony's earthworks, Manteo's waterfront for dinner. Overnight Manteo.
The oldest continually operating man-made canal in America (opened 1805), surveyed by George Washington. The swamp's deeper history: maroon communities of escaped slaves who built free lives in its fastness.
Colonial Spanish mustangs — shipwreck descendants — roaming the 4x4 beaches past the pavement's end. Fifty feet minimum; they enforce it better than the ordinance does.
The 1767 courthouse green running down to the sound — and the 1774 Edenton Tea Party, 51 women in organized political resistance, among America's first. Harriet Jacobs hid seven years in an attic here before her escape; her memoir told the world.
Roanoke, 1587: Virginia Dare's birthplace, then 115 people gone, one carved word — CROATOAN. The waterside drama has run since 1937 (Andy Griffith spent five seasons in tights here). The 400-year-old Mother Vine scuppernong still fruits nearby.
December 17, 1903: twelve seconds, 120 feet. The four flight markers pace out the distances in the sand — shorter than a 747's wingspan, which is the whole point.
Navigate day 1 in Google Maps ↗ · via Edenton, Corolla's Wild Horses (spur), Fort Raleigh & The Lost Colony
NC 12 south: Bodie Island Light, Pea Island's birds, the Rodanthe stretch where the ocean keeps renegotiating the road, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on its second site. The free ferry to Ocracoke runs about an hour; the village at the far end rewards it. Overnight Ocracoke.
America's tallest brick lighthouse (198 ft), famously moved 2,900 feet inland in 1999 ahead of the eating sea. Offshore: Diamond Shoals, the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic' — 600-plus wrecks and counting.
Free ferry in; pirate history everywhere. Blackbeard fought his last at Teach's Hole (November 22, 1718 — head to a bowsprit). Islanders still carry the 'hoi toider' brogue; the British Cemetery holds four sailors from the 1942 U-boat war, forever England.
December 17, 1903: twelve seconds, 120 feet. The four flight markers pace out the distances in the sand — shorter than a 747's wingspan, which is the whole point.
The East Coast's tallest natural dune system — hang gliders by day, soundside sunsets that empty the beach by evening. The dune ate a mini-golf course in the '70s; it occasionally returns pieces.
The 1874 station of the surfmen who rowed into burning seas — the 1918 Mirlo rescue is the service's great epic. Summer beach-apparatus drills still fire the breeches buoy.
Navigate day 2 in Google Maps ↗ · via Wright Brothers Memorial (spur), Jockey's Ridge, Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
The Cedar Island ferry — book it, it is two hours and change across Pamlico Sound — then Down East through the fishing villages to Beaufort: the Maritime Museum, the horses across the channel on Carrot Island. On to New Bern for Tryon Palace and the drugstore where Pepsi started. Overnight New Bern.
Free ferry in; pirate history everywhere. Blackbeard fought his last at Teach's Hole (November 22, 1718 — head to a bowsprit). Islanders still carry the 'hoi toider' brogue; the British Cemetery holds four sailors from the 1942 U-boat war, forever England.
Two and a quarter hours across open sound — gulls drafting the stern, cars dozing, the best cheap boat ride in America. Reserve ahead; the schedule is the itinerary.
Decoy carvers and Down East boatbuilding culture, community-built and proud. Passenger ferries run to Cape Lookout's diamond light and Shackleford's wild horses.
Blackbeard's flagship, found in the inlet in 1996, surfaces cannon by cannon at the Maritime Museum. The Old Burying Ground keeps the girl buried in a rum barrel (her father's promise to bring her home — kept, after a fashion).
Shrimp burgers and hushpuppies on the same working dock since 1938 — the name was a Depression-era hygiene boast, now a badge.
Navigate day 3 in Google Maps ↗ · via The Cedar Island Ferry, Core Sound Museum (spur), Beaufort & the Queen Anne's Revenge, Sanitary Fish Market
US 17 proper through the Croatan National Forest — the one leg on the numbered highway itself between the atlas routes, pines and pocosin and a Marine base. Wilmington's riverfront by afternoon, the battleship across the Cape Fear at sunset. Overnight Wilmington.
'Hollywood East': Dawson's Creek and One Tree Hill pilgrims still walk the riverwalk. The battleship North Carolina broods across the water; Britt's Donuts (1939, glazed only, cash only) fries at Carolina Beach.
Navigate day 4 in Google Maps ↗
Brunswick Town's ruins, a brisk transit of the Grand Strand, then Brookgreen Gardens and Georgetown's waterfront and rice museum. Hampton Plantation, McClellanville's shrimp docks, the sweetgrass basket stands outside Mount Pleasant — buy on the highway, not downtown. Overnight Charleston.
Anna Hyatt Huntington's 1931 sculpture garden spread through old rice fields — one of the great collections of American figurative sculpture, with live oaks doing the staging.
A shrimping village under cathedral oaks — T.W. Graham's fries the day's catch; Hurricane Hugo's 1989 surge line is still pointed out on porch posts.
Rainbow Row to the Battery, Philip Simmons's wrought-iron gates, Fort Sumter offshore where it all began (April 12, 1861). Eat the whole story: Bowens Island's oyster shack on the creek, Bertha's Kitchen's okra soup — both James Beard classics.
Brunswick stew's contested birthplace (Virginia objects; the 1898 'original pot' is displayed here regardless) and a working shrimp port. Lover's Oak downtown has hosted courtships for a claimed 900 years.
The town that named a cooking style: lightly battered, flash-fried, served in heaps where the fleet ties up. Jimmy Durante's sign-off — 'Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash' — may or may not be about a local café owner; the town has chosen to believe.
Navigate day 5 in Google Maps ↗ · via Calabash, Myrtle Beach, Unrepentant, Brookgreen Gardens, Pawleys Island, Georgetown Rice Museum, McClellanville, The Sweetgrass Highway
The ACE Basin, Old Sheldon Church's twice-burned columns, Beaufort for lunch on the water, then the last of the Kings Highway over the Savannah River. The squares at dusk. Overnight Savannah.
Rainbow Row to the Battery, Philip Simmons's wrought-iron gates, Fort Sumter offshore where it all began (April 12, 1861). Eat the whole story: Bowens Island's oyster shack on the creek, Bertha's Kitchen's okra soup — both James Beard classics.
A live oak perhaps 400–500 years old, shading 17,000 square feet — limbs like whales sounding through the earth. Free, and quieter than any cathedral.
Brick columns open to the sky — burned by the British in 1779, wrecked again after the Civil War. Spanish moss, birdsong, and the South's whole arc in one ruined nave.
One of the first schools for freed slaves (1862), later the only Southern retreat where Dr. King's interracial team could safely meet — his cottage remains. The beating heart of Gullah Geechee culture; the Saturday fish fry is church.
Pat Conroy's town and Hollywood's favorite porch: The Big Chill house, Forrest Gump's locations, The Prince of Tides everywhere. Horse carriages under the oaks of The Point; the Conroy Literary Center holds the words.
Navigate day 6 in Google Maps ↗ · via Angel Oak (spur), Old Sheldon Church Ruins, Penn Center (spur), Beaufort (spur)
Midway's 1792 church and its walled graveyard, Darien's shrimp fleet and Fort King George, Brunswick's live-oak squares. Across the causeway to Jekyll: Driftwood Beach at low tide, the millionaires' cottages that were the point of the island before anyone was allowed on it. Overnight Jekyll.
Brunswick stew's contested birthplace (Virginia objects; the 1898 'original pot' is displayed here regardless) and a working shrimp port. Lover's Oak downtown has hosted courtships for a claimed 900 years.
A 1792 New England-style meetinghouse in the Georgia pines — its tiny congregation produced two signers of the Declaration. The cemetery's live oaks predate the nation that resulted.
Memory Park Chapel (1949): about a dozen seats, stained glass, door never locked. Rebuilt by donations after a 2015 fire — the congregation is whoever pulls over.
Reservation-only ferry to Hogg Hummock — one of the last intact Gullah Geechee communities, holding on against tax pressure and time. Tours by community members; book well ahead, tread gently.
Shrimp boats beside the brick chimney of a rice empire — Fanny Kemble's 1838–39 journal from this plantation helped turn British opinion against slavery. Black Union troops burned the town in 1863, the raid that troubled Glory's Col. Shaw.
Navigate day 7 in Google Maps ↗ · via Midway Church, Smallest Church in America, Sapelo Island (spur), Darien & Butler Island, St. Simons Tree Spirits (spur), Brunswick
St. Marys, where the Cumberland ferry leaves (save it for another day; it wants a whole one), then over the line to Fernandina Beach's Victorian main street on Amelia. A1A down the barrier islands, the Mayport ferry across the St. Johns, and the Castillo in St. Augustine by late afternoon — the oldest city, end of the line.
Ferry from St. Marys to wild horses grazing the ruins of Carnegie's Dungeness; JFK Jr. married in the one-room First African Baptist chapel at the island's north end (1996). Book the ferry weeks ahead; bring everything, buy nothing — there's nothing to buy.
Florida's oldest continuously operating bar (1903), mahogany and murals intact, in the eight-flags town where the modern shrimping industry was born. Pirate's punch; reasonable people order two.
Salt-bleached oak and cedar skeletons toppled along the bluff — the Atlantic slowly eating the maritime forest, beautifully.
The little St. Johns River ferry keeps A1A unbroken (cars, gulls, five minutes of brine); Singleton's Seafood Shack at the landing fries what the boats brought.
Venerable Florida kitsch: the Ponce-themed park has poured sulfurous 'youth' since the early 1900s (peacocks included); the 1893 Alligator Farm keeps every living crocodilian species. Finish with Minorcan clam chowder — datil-pepper heat found nowhere else.
Navigate day 8 in Google Maps ↗ · via Cumberland Island (spur), Palace Saloon, Boneyard Beach, Mayport Ferry & Singleton's
US 17: Outer Banks to Florida is a 8-day trip of about 820 miles.
It starts in Norfolk.
It chains Outer Banks & the Sound Country, Kings Highway & the Lowcountry and Golden Isles & the First Coast.
Day 1: Manteo; Day 2: Ocracoke; Day 3: New Bern; Day 4: Wilmington; Day 5: Charleston; Day 6: Savannah; Day 7: Jekyll; Day 8: near St. Augustine Beach, FL.