Yu can go over the bridge if you have a Yugo. I made a sick joke there but it really isn’t funny at all. I went over the Mackinac Bridge today for about the umpteen millionth time. The first time I went over that dern bridge was when I was three. I can remember it, sorta. I doubt The Engineer would remember it much, being only a few months old at the time. But he was with us, big as life!

I had gone back and forth across the Mackinac Bridge about a billion times before someone actually drove off the bridge. Wiki is the best I can do for the moment. Her name was Leslie Pluhar and she was driving a Yugo (remember those?) and she was apparently driving too fast for the wind conditions. I was in the Landfill Chitchen on the Planet Ann Arbor on the evening before the incident and Grandroobly called me from the Moominbeach cabin. He stepped outside on the deck and held the phone out specifically so I could hear the wind howling! He and The Commander were having a great time then, years away from the frailty that comes with being an octogenarian.

I think about Leslie just about every time I cross the Mackinac Bridge. Lots of scenarios about how her car flipped over the side of the bridge were published after the incident and I have a hard time thinking about how her family dealt with that. I have never been afraid of the bridge but I have definitely been careful about observing the speed limit since her death.

In August of 2007, Mouse made our first blog post from the bridge. We were driving down to the Petoskey area for a Yarn Store Boondoggle and I had a brand new iPhone (the one I still have). She couldn’t post a photo of the bridge at that time from the iPhone. Nevertheless, our Mackinac Bridge post was a first, at least for our family. Nowadays, I post a bridge photo of some sort on Twitter and sometimes Facebook every time I go north. And wonder at how much life has changed since the Mackinac Bridge opened the first time I crossed it as a three-year-old with my parents and infant brother in 1957.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 9:23 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.