Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge

Drivers call it the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge or the 20 Mile Bridge: close to 18 miles of Interstate 10 carried on stilts over swamp, which made it the second-longest bridge in the country when it opened in 1973, behind only the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Work reportedly started in 1971. The memorial name came from veterans of the 82nd Airborne Division Association, who petitioned for it, and the legislature adopted it in 1989. Crashes are common at the two river crossings, which lack shoulders; the speed limit was cut in 1999 and trucks were restricted in 2003.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — steps away
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 14 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 15 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 16 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya Welcome Center) — steps away
• Atchafalaya Floodway — 4.2 mi
• Atchafalaya River (Butte La Rose Boat Landing) — 4.8 mi
• Louis Hebert — 7.8 mi