So we managed to get on the Mackinac Bridge and it’s, it’s a nice bridge. I, I was really, I was so apprehensive about going on it, but my daughter wanted to go so I thought, “I’ll brave it for her.” And the reason I was apprehensive is, many years ago when I took them on a road trip through California, we got on the Golden Gate Bridge. I can’t remember if we got on the Oakland Bridge, we might have. But the Golden Gate Bridge was so terrifying that as soon as — as soon as we were on it, I just wanted to get off. But you’re stuck, you’re committed to it. Once you get on the bridge, you have to cross over the bridge. I think what made the Golden Gate Bridge so terrifying was, it’s up so high that you can see all the way down and you, you realize you’re so far up in the air, and if there’s some horrible mishap, you could plummet down into the ocean. It was, it was just, really frightening and probably the traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. That probably add, added to it.
Today coming up on the Mackinac Bridge, it wasn’t frightening and that really surprised me that it wasn’t frightening. I did steal glimpses off to each side to the lake and it looked like we’re traveling over the ocean, and it’s, it was such a far, far bridge, because it just kept going for several minutes. I think one of the reasons it wasn’t so frightening was that it’s much lower than the — or it seems much lower than the Golden Gate Bridge. Another one is maybe that they used the steel cables instead of the steel construction ‘cause Golden Gate Bridge has a lot of steel bars. And maybe the — I don’t think it’s the color of the Golden Gate Bridge versus the color of the Mackinac Bridge. The Mackinac Bridge has a lot more openness to it because of the steel cables. So you, you’re just looking into the sky and the lake. So you have that feeling of openness and nature. The Golden Gate Bridge, you see the concrete, the bases for the pillars that are holding up the bridge. Maybe it’s the cragginess of the rocks on either side. The Mackinac Bridge is just straight through, you’re looking straight through to the other side.
Another thing that might have helped was that the vehicle in front of me, it was a transport vehicle carrying — not blue logs. If you can imagine like those Lincoln Logs except blue, and rectangles. It was a huge amount of blue rectangles in the back of that vehicle. So, I had to just look at that and follow it to get across the bridge. There’s construction going — repair work going on on the right side of the bridge. So it was one lane in each direction. There wasn’t any feeling of being in congestion, traffic congestion, whereas the Golden Gate Bridge, I think you’ve got two or three lanes in each direction, and California being what it is, it’s super crowded. So that, that experience in California was really frightening, where the experience going over the Mackinac Bridge was not frightening at all. And then when you get across, there’s this big sign, “Welcome to the Upper Peninsula!”