I had forgotten about those pdf maps even though I had downloaded almost the whole state some time ago. It’s amazing how many resources are available for free. It hasn’t been that long since I ordered all of the county maps of the state from the DOT and the cost per map wasn’t much more than the shipping. Now they are on line for nothing.

Looking at the map segment brought back to mind my last trip across the Apalachicola Bay Bridge back in the mid-80s.

A reporter and I were chasing Hurricane Elena all over the gulf states. We had landed in Biloxi when the storm took a turn east, so we were about four hours behind it driving through rough winds and fire-hose like rains.

When we got to the bridge – a long, long bridge – over the bay, we ran into an unmanned roadblock. To detour around it would have cost us four or five hours, assuming that some of the small roads hadn’t been blocked by fallen trees.

I turned to my partner and said, “Let’s do it.” (I was driving, so he didn’t have much choice.)

We’re in the middle of the bay with swells breaking over the bridge and I’m thinking, “Fifty years from now, some shrimper is going to pull up a rusted rental car with two skeletons in it and wonder what happened. This is a REALLY bad idea.”

Since I’m typing this in 2008, we obviously made it to the other side.

The storm stalled off Tampa and then recurved back into the Gulf, ultimately making landfall in MS, not far from where we started. In all, I drove almost 2,800 miles trying to catch up with the darned thing.

My last stop on the way home was on Sanibel Island off Florida’s Gulf Coast. I interviewed a woman who had elected to ride out the storm on the low island. “What were you thinking? If that storm hadn’t turned you’d have had a storm surge that would have cleared off the whole place.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You just told me that you chased the storm for over 2,000 miles. I stayed in one place. Which one of us is crazy?”

That was logic I couldn’t fight.