The Coleman Bridge
On the eastern coast of Virginia, in the area that is considered the Coastal Plain, there are four peninsulas. The first is called the Eastern Shore of Virginia. It is separated from the mainland by the Chesapeake Bay. Bordered by the bay on the west, the Atlantic on the east and the Maryland Eastern Shore on the north, this peninsula is generally visited by traveling via the 17 mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.
The other three peninsula’s are the Northern Neck, the Middle Peninsula and one known simply as the Peninsula. The Northern Neck is located between the Potomac and the Rappahannock Rivers; the Middle Peninsula is located between the Rappahannock and the York Rivers; and the Peninsula is located between the York and James River. I live on the Peninsula…..see the little star on the map above ~ that’s approximately where I live.
As you can see, if you live in this region of Virginia, traveling any distance often requires going over bridges and sometimes going through tunnels to get to where you want to be. There are three bridge/tunnels in my immediate area. These are a combination of bridges and underwater tunnels so you can travel from point A to point B without going around through the state. These are things we in this area sometimes take for granted….*yawn*, doesn’t everyone travel underwater to get to their locations? 🙂 I often forget this when people come to visit and exclaim how excited they were to go through the tunnels.
In addition to bridge/tunnels, we have just your standard bridges as well. One bridge I travel on frequently is the Coleman Bridge, the largest double swing bridge in the United States. This is the bridge that connects the Peninsula to the Middle Peninsula. My oldest daughter has friends who live in Gloucester, which is located over the Coleman Bridge on the Middle Peninsula. This photo was taken from the beach area below the Coleman on the Gloucester side of the bridge. If you click on the photo to enlarge it and look to the bottom left of the bridge, you can see a tiny bit of Yorktown, Virginia. 🙂
It is quite a site, especially when you realize that this bridge was expanded to four lanes in 1995. Six spans were dismantled and six replacements spans were floated down the river and put into place in only nine days.
People lined the banks on both the Yorktown and Gloucester side of the York River to watch these spans come and go. By prefabricating the spans and floating them to the location, they shaved a lot of time off the actual bridge closing during expansion. During the closure, residents on the Middle Peninsula that worked on the Peninsula had to travel around, adding about two hours to their commute times. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like.
The view while riding on the bridge is amazing. Unfortunately, there is no place to pull off and take photos ~ but I can imagine if there were, that would create traffic problems on the bridge. There are locations where you can take photographs of the bridge much like the one I took from the beach area. There are several locations you can take photos of the entire bridge, or large parts of it. One such place is located on the Colonial Parkway near Yorktown. I took this photo during the first full moon this past December….
This photo doesn’t encompass the entire bridge, but it gives you a pretty good idea of the York River and the Coleman Bridge. Both are quite a site, wouldn’t you agree?
