Wilmington

Lia and I arrived in Wilmington expecting a quiet river town and instead found a city that has quietly become a working film backlot, its live oaks and Victorian storefronts standing in for a hundred different Hollywood towns over the decades. We noticed it first on a plaque near the old Thalian Hall theater listing productions shot nearby, and then kept noticing it everywhere — a diner counter, a courthouse steps, a stretch of the Riverwalk — each one faintly familiar from some show we couldn’t quite place. Beneath the movie-set gloss, though, Wilmington is unmistakably a real Southern river city, built on rice and naval stores money and shaped by the wide brown current of the Cape Fear.

The Historic District and the Riverwalk

We spent our first afternoon walking the mile-and-a-half boardwalk of the Riverwalk, where tugboats and the occasional Battleship North Carolina tour boat drift past outdoor cafes and ice cream stands. One block inland, the Historic District unfolds in oak-shaded squares of Italianate and Greek Revival mansions, many of them still occupied rather than museum-frozen, their wraparound porches strung with ferns. Lia insisted we detour down Nun Street and Dock Street just to look at the ironwork balconies, and we ended up eating fried okra at a sidewalk table watching the light go copper over the river.

Wrightsville Beach and the coast

Ten minutes east, the city gives way entirely to sand. Wrightsville Beach is Wilmington’s barrier-island escape valve, a laid-back surf town of pastel cottages and a long fishing pier where we watched pelicans dive-bomb bait schools at sunrise. We rented paddleboards and drifted along the calm side of the island near Banks Channel, then earned a plate of fried shrimp and hushpuppies at a shack that has clearly not changed its recipe in fifty years. The beach here never feels overrun the way some Carolina coastal towns do — locals still outnumber tourists on a Tuesday morning.

The Battleship and Cape Fear history

Across the river, the USS North Carolina sits permanently moored, a gray steel veteran of the Pacific theater that Lia insisted on touring deck by deck, down into the boiler rooms and gun turrets while I got increasingly lost in the maze of ladders. Afterward we drove south along the river road to Fort Fisher, the Confederate earthwork fort whose fall in 1865 helped seal the Union blockade, its grass-covered mounds now overlooking a wide, wind-scoured beach where we found more sand dollars than people.

Getting There

Wilmington International Airport (ILM) offers direct flights from several East Coast hubs and sits just ten minutes from downtown. By car, it’s roughly two and a half hours from Raleigh via I-40, a straight shot east through pine forest that ends abruptly at the coast. Once downtown, the Historic District and Riverwalk are entirely walkable, though a car or rideshare is useful for reaching Wrightsville Beach, Fort Fisher, and the battleship across the river.