8 Coolest Small Towns in North Carolina for a Summer Vacation

North Carolina cannot decide what kind of summer it wants, so it offers all of them at once. You can chase waterfalls in the Blue Ridge before lunch and have your toes in the Atlantic by the next afternoon. The eight spots below run the full spread: a mile-high mountain village where the wind blows snow back up a cliff, a colonial river town that invented Pepsi, and a beach town that moonlights as "Hollywood East." Some are tiny. A couple are full-blown small cities. All eight know how to do a Carolina summer right.

Blowing Rock

Blowing Rock is named after a cliff that does a party trick: the wind funnels up the gorge so hard that snow can fall upward, and light objects tossed off the edge come floating back. The Cherokee told a love story to explain it; meteorologists eventually just confirmed the updraft is real. The overlook is worth the small admission, but the free thrill is the Glen Burney Trail, which drops right off Main Street into a gorge past three waterfalls. Grandfather Mountain and its mile-high swinging bridge sit a short drive away, and Tweetsie Railroad keeps younger kids busy with a Wild West steam train. Cap the day on Main Street, all porch-front shops and ice cream.

New Bern

Here is your trivia win for the summer: New Bern is where Pepsi was born. In 1898, pharmacist Caleb Bradham mixed up a fountain drink he called "Brad's Drink," soon rebranded Pepsi-Cola, and a re-creation of his pharmacy still pours it downtown. The town was founded in 1710 by Swiss and German settlers who named it for Bern, Switzerland, which is why decorated bear statues turn up all over town (Bern means "bear"). The headliner is Tryon Palace, the reconstructed 1770 residence of the royal colonial governor, with formal gardens along the Trent River. Browse Middle Street for antiques, grab a riverside seat, and aim for Mumfest in October if your timing allows.

Asheville

Asheville is where the mountains get weird, in the best way. The town pours more craft beer per resident than almost anywhere in the country, has a busker on nearly every downtown corner, and turned a stretch of old riverfront warehouses into the River Arts District, where you can watch glassblowers and painters at work. The obvious blowout is the Biltmore Estate, George Vanderbilt's 250-room château and the largest privately owned home in the United States, complete with its own winery. When you need to walk it off, the Blue Ridge Mountains and the trails of Pisgah and DuPont forests start just outside town. Summer weekends here almost always come with a festival attached.

Wilmington

You have probably already seen Wilmington without realizing it. So many films and shows have shot here, including Dawson's Creek and Iron Man 3, that the town picked up the nickname "Hollywood East." The mile-long Riverwalk runs along the Cape Fear, with the battleship USS North Carolina moored directly across the water as a floating WWII museum. Downtown mixes vintage shops and seafood joints along a long Historic District, and the beaches are minutes away: Wrightsville Beach for surfing and the old-school Johnnie Mercer's Pier, plus quieter sand at Carolina and Kure Beaches. Airlie Gardens adds a few hundred acres of live oaks and azaleas for slower mornings.

Highlands

Highlands sits above 4,000 feet, which makes it one of the highest towns in the eastern United States and a natural air conditioner when the lowlands turn sticky. The signature draw is waterfalls you barely have to work for: at Dry Falls you walk along a path behind the curtain of water, and at Bridal Veil Falls you can literally drive your car under the overhang. In town, a tight grid of galleries, cafes, and bookshops keeps things genteel, and the Highlands Food and Wine Festival each November pulls chefs from across the South. Lake Sequoyah and the surrounding Nantahala forest round out a town that does cool, in both senses of the word, very well.

Southport

Southport has quietly been a movie star for years, standing in for small-town America in films like A Walk to Remember and Safe Haven. It sits right where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic, an old fishing village of shaded streets, porch swings, and a working waterfront. Its biggest day by far is the Fourth of July, when Southport hosts the North Carolina Fourth of July Festival, the state's official one, and a town of a few thousand swells to tens of thousands. The rest of summer runs slower, built around fresh shrimp, the ferry across to car-free Bald Head Island, and the Oak Island Lighthouse a short hop away.

Valle Crucis

Valle Crucis is barely a town, and that is the point. The main event is the Original Mast General Store, open since 1883, where the floors creak, the candy is sold by the pound out of wooden barrels, and the pot-bellied stove still anchors the back room like it is 1900. The surrounding valley, set between Boone and Blowing Rock, is all pasture, river, and old farmhouses. Cool off with a tube or a fly rod on the Watauga River, then aim for the Original Valle Country Fair in October, an old-fashioned crafts-and-cider gathering that has run for decades. It may be the slowest and most pleasant eight square miles in the High Country.

Brevard

Brevard has a mascot situation, in the cutest possible way: white squirrels. A population of pale, almost ghostly squirrels has taken over town, descended (so the story goes) from a pair that escaped a carnival truck in the 1950s, and Brevard now throws a White Squirrel Festival every Memorial Day weekend in their honor. The town also calls itself the Land of Waterfalls, with hundreds of them across Transylvania County, including roadside Looking Glass Falls and the natural waterslide at Sliding Rock. Nearby DuPont State Forest stood in for the arena woods in The Hunger Games, and the Brevard Music Center fills summer nights with concerts. Pisgah National Forest handles everything else.

One State, Every Kind of Summer

The fun of North Carolina in summer is that you never have to pick a lane. You can drive behind a waterfall in Highlands at noon and eat fried shrimp on the Southport waterfront by dinner, or swap Asheville's breweries for a general store where the candy still comes out of wooden barrels. Mountains on one end, the Atlantic on the other, and a string of towns in between that each do their own thing well. Pick the version of summer you are in the mood for, and the state has a town ready for it.