The reason the GG and his hiking partner were escorted across the Big Mac yesterday was high winds. When the beach urchins were babies, my dad called me from the moomincabin one evening at cocktail hour and held his phone out the door so I could hear the wind screaming on the shores of gitchee gumee. News came the next morning that a woman driving a Yugo had gone over the side of the bridge. (The link is from the Detroit Free Press. I did not face a paywall although as a non-subscriber, I sometimes have. If it doesn’t work, google Mackinac Bridge Yugo.) This horrific accident was terrifying because we cross the bridge often enough to have commuter passes. If you don’t read the article, rest assured, this was a RARE event. Only one other such incident has occurred and that was ruled a suicide. Seems like an awful way to go in any case.

Yesterday was a bad weather day in the yooperland but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the night of the Yugo incident. But the bridge authority has become a lot more careful in recent years. I did not know they were escorting small campers like the Lyme Lounge and Sunny yesterday but I subscribe to bridge authority alerts and did get a high wind alert.

One of the main reasons for closing the bridge in the past few years has been falling ice. At first I was wondering what the heck? But then I saw some pictures on FB of vee-hickles with smashed windshields from falling ice. Okay then.

In general, if you have any kind of automotive trouble on the bridge, the authorities are ON IT! A few years ago some yooper friends of mine had a flat tire somewhere mid-span. The bridge patrol got there STAT and changed their tire for them, a job I’m sure they could have handled on their own on a yooperland back road. With two lanes in each direction, backups are not a good idea, especially now that the yooperland seems to have become a red hot travel destination. Of course that doesn’t take into account CONSTRUCTION backups and the bridge constantly undergoes maintenance construction, at least in the warm months. Traffic backups or not, ongoing maintenance is a GOOD thing on a five-mile suspension bridge.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2023 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.