Historic Southport Waterfront

Southport is the postcard version of a Carolina coastal town, and it has been used as exactly that by a long list of film crews. Live oaks hung with Spanish moss, white clapboard houses with deep porches, and a waterfront looking out over the mouth of the Cape Fear River toward Bald Head Island and Oak Island. Spend the time on foot. Howe Street has the galleries, antique shops and ice cream; Bay Street has the benches and the view, and watching the pilot boats and shrimpers work the river channel is a decent way to lose an hour. The North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport is small, free, and genuinely good on Blackbeard and the area’s shipwrecks. For food, the waterfront seafood places do the obvious thing well — ask for whatever came in that morning. It’s an easy twenty-minute drive from the house over the bridge, and it works as either a half-day or a full evening. Parking is free but tight near the water on summer weekends; there’s more of it a couple of streets back. The Fourth of July festival is a big deal here and worth planning around, in either direction.