Dave’s Midlife Blog

After our arrival home from Florida on Wednesday night, Thursday was a free day for me. I decided I’d go downtown into DC and take a look at Nationals Park.

Looking back at the archives of this blog, I am astounded to note that it has been a whole year since I was last down at the ballpark site with my camera. I have been following the progress of construction on the construction cam (to which I won’t link, since it might not be online for very much longer), but I haven’t seen it in person since March 17, 2007.

I expected it to be different–and it was. Where there were once deep pits in some blocks of the neighborhood, there are now high-rise buildings emerging.

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Today was the last baseball game of our trip. We’ve had kind of a bummer experience watching the Nationals play so far. They lost to the Dodgers on Saturday, the day we arrived. Then on Sunday, while we were exploring the American space program at Kennedy Space Center, the Nats were in Ft. Lauderdale losing egregiously to the Orioles 11-3. (Alas, yes, it was 11-3, not 8-2 as I reported on Sunday.) Then yesterday they lost rather decisively to the NY Mets, 7-3.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that we drove across the Florida peninsula today to Lakeland to watch the Nationals take on the Detroit Tigers–a formidable team, the American League champions of 2006–in the Tigers’ spring training camp in Lakeland.

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We got an early start today and got over to the Nationals’ spring training site, Historic Space Coast Stadium in Viera, about a half an hour from our hotel in Melbourne. We thought we were early, but we were not at all the first ones there. Today being March 17, there was a St. Patrick’s Day thing going on–everybody (besides us) seemed to be wearing green. Even the teams wore green caps. We thought that looked pretty doofy, but I guess we were in the minority.

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Day #2 of our Florida trip was devoted to driving to the Kennedy Space Center. The Washington Nationals, our real reason for being here on the coast of central Florida, were playing the Baltimore Orioles in Ft. Lauderdale. (They lost the game 8-2.) Ft. Lauderdale is many hours down the coast from here, just north of Miami, and so we decided to skip that game. When I looked at a map of the Grapefruit League teams, I noticed that Ft. Lauderdale is the spring training location farthest removed from any of the others.

Instead, we got up relatively early for being on vacation, and prepared to drive up the coast. (more…)

About a year and a half ago, my wife suggested it would be a fantastic vacation if we could travel to Florida for spring training for our beloved Washington Nationals.

This year, Easter is early enough that my spring break from schoolteaching coincides with spring training. So here we are in Melbourne Beach, Florida, about a half hour away from the Nats’ spring training camp in Viera. (more…)