When I was growing up in southwest Virginia, I would occasionally see advertisements for relatively nearby Grandfather Mountain. They were local productions, and looked it — something someone had filmed with a high-end video camera, then added a voice-over.

I was really unimpressed.

Yesterday, twenty-some years after seeing those ads, I visited Grandfather Mountain.

The key attraction at GM is its “world-famous” mile-high swinging bridge. Just to make that clear — the bridge itself is not suspended with a mile of empty space below it. The actual height of the bridge is probably about sixty feet. However, it is on a mountain with an elevation above 5,280 feet. Certainly, no one expects a literally mile-high bridge, but I was thinking it’d be a bit higher than sixty or so feet. Then again, I never looked closely at the TV spots.