Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel

Well kids on our way back from our trip to Rehoboth Beach we decided to take the world famous Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.  This is a combination of bridges and tunnels that connect Virginia Beach with the eastern shore.  Some say that it saves almost 100 miles vs. going around by land.  The bay bridge-tunnel is considered one of the top 7 engineering wonders in the world!

 

Before the bridge-tunnel was built cars had to be transported by ferry boats

There are two parallel bridge/tunnels but at first there was only one.  The first one was opened in 1964 after 42 months of construction.  The second span was opened in 1999 after about the same amount of construction time.  The cost of the second span was over $197 million dollars which seems pretty reasonable to me??  There was never any tax money used to build the bridge-tunnel instead they sold bonds and those people are paid back through the tolls that are collected.   For a car to travel across it cost $13.00 each way (unless you return within 24 hours) and if you are towing a boat it goes to $22.00!

Going into a tunnel

That's me with my head in the hole

From shore to shore, the Bridge-Tunnel measures 17.6 miles and is considered the world's largest bridge-tunnel complex. Construction of the span required undertaking a project of more than 12 miles of low-level trestle, two 1-mile tunnels, two bridges, almost 2 miles of causeway, four manmade islands and 5-1/2 miles of approach roads, totaling 23 miles.

When we lived in Virginia Beach the second span wasn't open and we would hear stories about head on collisions and once we even heard that a wind gust blew a tractor trailer right off the bridge!  We took you kids over it in 1992 when we spent a week in Rehoboth with your grandparents Clark...same week that OJ killed his wife!

Cool thing to do if you are traveling this way but certainly too expensive to do on a regular basis but still falls in the Bucket List category!