July 13, 2006 - Bridges of Edison County

Given the current political climate in Santa Barbara, the country, and the world, it seems like there just aren’t enough bridges. And, even though we keep electing officials who promise to build bridges between groups with opposing views and to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots, we often end up with trolls, who pay all their attention to the biggest goats.

Yesterday, Edhat paid attention to bridges, and only the small ones. We drove around town taking pictures of all the foot and bike bridges that we could think of, and that our little green car would take us to. From the bike paths of Goleta to the parks in the City, we crossed and photographed them all. We met some nice people during our bridge-to-bridge tour. A woman in I.V. told us she was a model and asked if we were photographers. And, we had a brief encounter with a concerned bicyclist who was scared that he had just ridden over what we photographing. He had, of course, because he had just ridden over the bridge!

We didn’t make it to all the bridges on our list (SBCC, the one past East Beach, and the one on top of the dam at the Botanic Garden to name a few). One bridge we didn’t visit on purpose was the bridge that connects Cacique (rhymes with “the creek”) Road, where it is separated by Sycamore Creek. We didn’t need to photograph that bridge because we had already done so. The picture was shown as yesterday’s Wednesday Where Is It (WWII).

In case you aren’t familiar with Cacique, it’s the road divided by Milpas just south of the freeway. Current transportation plans call for a “new Cacique Street connection between Milpas Street and Alisos Street (under 101)”. The bridge shown above is east of where the new underground connection (tunnel?) will be. It crosses Sycamore Creek at the intersection of Cacique and Soledad.

We found out in a Daily Edhat last September that before THE 101 was built, Cacique was part of the way into town. It connected the Old Coast Highway to Milpas. But that road has washed away, and now the little bridge is the only way to cross the creek on Cacique (remember - it rhymes). BTW, someone should tell Mapquest and Google Maps about this. They show the road going through.

Please check out our Bridges of Edison County photomontage. And, please email us with bridges that we missed. When we get them all, we will put them on a nice picture map like we did with the hitching posts.

Only six subscribers identified the Cacique Bridge as the bridge in the photo. Those six were ZackSilver, Huggerdog, Luvpilot, LB7997, BrownSquared, Cajundave, and S-Dawg. The Edhat Dog was given a choice of six full-sized dog biscuits for her evening bedtime treat. Without knowing whose biscuits were whose she chose Huggerdog’s. Huggerdog wins an Edhat t-shirt and a virtual hug from the Edhat Dog.

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