Inexplicable hit increase explained

I've mentioned a few times how neat it is that blogger provides info on various "hit" information for my pages. Every now and then, certain pages have atypical spikes. Sometimes I find out why; other times, I don't.

A few days ago, blogger showed that there were almost 70 hits overnight on one of my Land Between the Lakes posts. I didn't know why. For a little blog like mine, 70 hits on one hike post is very unusual (Typically, I get anywhere from 40-120 hits a day, with older hike write-ups rarely getting more than 10 or 20 hits in a week).

Tonight, for a totally unrelated reason, I checked my e-mail account for my former employer in Murray, Kentucky. There was an announcement in my inbox there about something called the Eggner Ferry Bridge being hit by a barge. I googled, and found a Huffington Post story about this incident.

Read the story, and learned that this was the name of the bridge that crosses the Tennessee River (Kentucky Lake), just east of where KY80 and US68 merge, at the west end of Land Between the Lakes (LBL).

Obviously, I crossed over that bridge a lot: Twice each time I came to or from Nashville, and twice nearly every time I visited LBL (unless I visited the far southern end of the park). Probably 100 trips, total.

Everytime I drove over, my knuckles grabbed the steering wheel a little tighter. The Eggner bridge is an old (70+ years old), narrow, two-lane bridge that they've been talking about replacing for years. One of my co-workers said he always rolled his window down a little bit when he crossed the bridge, just in case it collapsed and tossed his car into the lake. I kid you not. It was a rickety-looking bridge to drive over.

But still picturesque.

Anyway, I guess someone figured out I had a picture of the bridge in my write-up for one of my hikes, and that's what spurred the big spike in hits.