Tangier and Smith Islands are in National Geographic Best Trips of 2016. Those Chesapeake Bay islands are along side international hot spots Cote d’Or in France, Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, the Danube River through Europe and Greenland.

National Geographic calls them “Historic—and Endangered—Communities of a Bygone America.”

In the middle of the lower Chesapeake Bay, almost facing each other across the Maryland–Virginia state line, sit two centuries-old, remote, and threatened communities.

With their low-lying shores yielding to erosion and storm surges, these two marshy “islands out of time” may be running out of time. Yet islanders are fighting to hang on, holding fast as long as they can to their thin and vulnerable homes. —Stephen Blakely

Read more about Tangier Island & Smith Island