It’s easy to relax into a visit to the Town of Manteo, North Carolina, a welcoming community where everything is easygoing from the moment you drop the hook or tie up at one of the local marinas.

Manteo wraps around Shallowbag Bay on the eastern side of Roanoke Island. The island lies between the beaches of North Carolina's Outer Banks and the sparsely populated low-lying mainland to the west.

In the town’s early days, every store lining the waterfront had two doors – one dockside for those coming by boat and the other streetside for those coming from the courthouse or one of the inns on Water Street.

Visitors to town today still conduct business, and are offered immersion into the island's history, including the representative 16th-century ship Elizabeth II at Roanoke Island Festival Park, the George Washington Creef Boathouse and Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse. The town also welcomes singers, dancers and actors back to Waterside Theatre each summer, where they perform the nation's oldest outdoor symphonic drama, The Lost Colony, now in its 86th year.