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.

The Tigers have had their camp in Lakeland for something like 72 years or so, since the 1930s. The stadium in which they play, Joker Marchant Stadium, was built in 1965. This is a spring training camp with a history. I don’t know whether I expected something old and run-down, but Joker Marchant Stadium (named for a parks and recreation director of the city of Lakeland) was a real treat.

The drive into Lakeland off Interstate 4 takes you along Lakeland Hills Boulevard through a suburban residental neighborhood. There’s a Honda dealership adjacent to Tigertown, the Tigers’ spring training camp. The sign depicted above greets you at the entrance.

The stadium complex is my idealized image of a Florida spring training facility. There are palm trees everywhere you look, and the architecture is that peach-colored Florida mission style.

The atmosphere is a combination of midwestern-polite and southern-cordial. There are Tiger fans everywhere you turn, but unlike the fans of Philadelphia or New York, these fans wear their pride with quiet dignity, not with braying bravado. Marchant Stadium is designed for baseball fans who want to have fun.

One of the most remarkable features of this park is the left-field berm. We strolled out there during batting practice. Because of the wind and the strength of some of the Nats’ batters, a number of batting-practice home runs came out to the berm. There was a mad scramble for each ball hit out there, and just about everybody except us had baseball gloves on. I understand from the Tigers’ website that “seats” in the berm section cost $7.00 each. This is one of the great bargains in baseball.

Barbara and I had never seen the Nationals during batting practice. At home games at RFK stadium, the stadium gates opened too late for most people to see any of the home team’s batting practice session. Today, of course, the Nats were the visitors, and I think Marchant Stadium’s doors were opened early anyway. We got a rare close-up look at our guys in action. This somewhat made up for our missing the morning workout yesterday at Space Coast Stadium.

The game today was apparently a sellout. The announced crowd was something like 7,900 or so. We did not see any sections with empty seats.

Ah yes. The game. Well, it was televised nationally on ESPN, and we Nats fans are so glad of this. The A-team was playing today: Nick Johnson was on 1st base, Lastings Milledge was in center field, young prospect Justin Maxwell was in left, Cristian Guzman was at short, Dmitri Young (who was dropped ignominiously by the Tigers two years ago because of his questionable behavior at the time) was the designated hitter.

In short, the Nats smashed the Tigers. Going into the ninth inning, it was 9-0 Nats. Our closing pitcher, Jesus Colome, gave up a meaningless two-out home run to Marcus Thames of the Tigers, but that was just a way for the Tigers to retain a bit of dignity.

And the Tigers had their A-team on the field today, too. Curtis Granderson, Ivan Rodriguez, Edgar Renteria, Jeremy Bonderman pitching. The Nats had their way with these guys. Nationals starting pitcher Tim Redding (pitching with the flu) held the Tigers scoreless through five innings, and relievers Joel Hanrahan and Ray King held them through the 8th. The Nats’ bats were hot today. Lastings Milledge did what we wanted to see when he hit a mighty homer. Justin Maxwell had a massive three-run shot himself, and Ronnie Belliard knocked in two runs with a tape-measure shot to the berm. Dmitri Young had an RBI single, as did Nick Johnson The sixth inning looked like batting practice for the Nationals.

I’m not really a baseball photographer, so this shot of Guzman swinging is pure luck on my part. I don’t think this at-bat was meaningful in any way; Guzman scored one run in the game, had one hit, and did not knock in any runs. But the Nats as a team were whacking the ball all over the field, drumming Tigers’ reliever Tim Byrdak in the sixth inning by scoring seven runs.

And the beauty part is that the national broadcast on ESPN showed the whole country the Nats as we hope they will play this season.

We left the stadium proud of our boys, and sad to be leaving spring training for 2008.

We hoped to see some of the major league players working out, and to maybe meet them and get some autographs. When we drove up at about 10:30 AM, the Nats were on practice field #5. By the time we got parked, the team had gone into the clubhouse. Bummer.

We were delighted, however, to note that the Nats have renamed that practice field in honor of their All-Star from last year, the National League Comeback Player of the year for 2007, Dmitri Young.

It really is true that you get closer to the players and personnel at spring training than you do at the stadium during the season. Even if you’re not there for the workouts or don’t have a press pass, the barriers between the players, managers, and executives are much less forbidding.

As we walked up toward the stadium and team store, we ran into pitcher Chris Schroeder, who had lagged behind the rest of the team going in. He nicely autographed a baseball for us, and then we saw pitcher Jason Bergmann coming out toward the practice field to do some running on the warning track. He signed a couple of baseballs for us as well.

Parked just next to the team store outside the stadium was a row of golf carts for manager Manny Acta and general manager Jim Bowden, I guess to make it easier for them to scoot from one side of the stadium to the practice fields or the minor league training site. It is a pretty big area, and you have to go across a large parking lot to get to the minor league camp, so I guess it’s worthwhile for the big guys to have their own (named) carts.

The game itself was not so great for the Nationals. Mike O’Connor was the starting pitcher, in what might have been a last shot at making the big-league rotation before the season starts. After a rough first inning in which he gave up a run, he held in there pretty well until the fifth, when he gave up another four runs. Three strikeouts, only one walk–but the Mets hit him all over the park.

And the Nats’ bats just could not get anything going until late in the game. Dmitri Young, in either his first or second start at first base, went 1 for 3 with a single that put him on base and in position to later score the Nats’ first run. Catcher Will Nieves and center fielder Justin Maxwell got important hits, and our favorite third baseman, Ryan Zimmerman, had an RBI single today as the designated hitter.

But as Barbara said, the Nats generally did not look as though they were having much fun. The final score, 7-3 Mets, seems to reflect that.

It’s cool to watch the players running drills after the game. We couldn’t figure out exactly who was in on this. It wasn’t all the players who had played the game, and it included some people who didn’t play a minute–but it seems to be a regular thing: a few light runs, made all together in a group, about the length of a baseline.

Tomorrow we’re off to Lakeland, about two hours across the state, where the Detroit Tigers have had their spring training camp since the 1930s. The game is in Joker Marchant Stadium, which has been in Lakeland since 1965.

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

Incidentally, we have nothing to complain about with regard to our hotel. We wake to sunrise views like this one. I took this picture out our window this morning. The Atlantic Ocean provides the white noise to which we sleep.

The drive to Kennedy Space Center takes about 45 minutes from Melbourne Beach. You drive up state highway A1A (known to me for being the title to a Jimmy Buffett album back in the 1970s), through Patrick Air Force Base and Cocoa Beach (where we actually saw I Dream of Jeannie Way) up to Port Canaveral. Then you have to drive back inland, over the Indian River, and enter the center from the west. It was a much longer drive than we expected, but not bad at all.

The KSC is located on Merritt Island, which is a huge wildlife preserve. That was another surprise to me. I’m not sure what I expected, but I didn’t expect this quasi-military base to be in the middle of a wildlife refuge. You drive for miles and miles and eventually come to the visitors’ center. The visitors’ center is somewhat like a theme park with free parking.

When we went in, we immediately saw an IMAX movie about the space station, and then we prowled around the visitors’ center area. Our big organizing event of the day was the bus tour throughout the space center, but on the way to the bus, we saw this interesting stone-and-water sculpture of the heavens in global form. Barbara has the universe in her hands here.

For a couple of Baby Boomers who lived through the Space Age as children and teenagers, this visit to the Kennedy Space Center was fascinating–and at times very emotional. The first stop on the bus tour was to a place called LC39, where there was an observation gantry. It took awhile for us to understand that this was the site of the launch pad for the Apollo missions to the moon. The view was great–but even greater was standing on the very spot where these trips to the moon began.

Next to the road on which we drove is the crawlway. This is a road that looks like two gravel roads with a grassy median. In fact, this road is designed to carry the space vehicles from the Vehicle Assembly Building

to the launch sites. The crawler is a huge platform with eight tracks, like those of military tanks, that slowly “crawl” the assembled vehicles to the launch sites. Here you can see a crawlway that leads out to LC39B, one of the two sites from which the space shuttles are launched. You can see the superstructure of LC39B in the background. It’s several miles away. This is as close as “normal” people are allowed to get.

The bus drove us from the LC39 observation gantry to the Apollo/Saturn V center. We saw a short movie about the three-man Apollo missions, then we went into a control room. We gasped in excitement when we were told that this room was not a mockup, but instead the actual control center for the flight to the moon.

A film showed us the moon landing, including shots of the control guys who were in this very room sweating bullets as the Lunar Module landed on the moon’s surface. And while the film was running on the screens, the various relevant seats and control stations were illuminated, and the various stages of progress were indicated on a big board to the side. For me the most intense moment was at the end of the countdown, when the rockets fired but before the vehicled had lifted off the launch pad. The indicator light for that moment said “COMMIT.” Yes, I guess that was truly a moment of commitment. Whew!

The Saturn V rocket was a huge thing. Here’s a picture of me standing beside it in the exhibition hall.

By the time we got to the International Space Station Center, we were tired and a bit overwhelmed. The Space Station is a fantastic thing: an international science laboratory permanently installed in space. It represents the efforts of many different countries to use zero-gravity for scientific experiments. Even the Russians–our arch-rivals, the fear of whom drove the space race in the 1960s–are active participants.

But there is much less of a “whiz-bang” effect with the space station. The station itself does not look like something from Star Trek, but rather like a military base in space. When I say that, I mean the architecture is that blah, bland, purely functional look of squareness and sheet metal one sees on any military base. And the science that is conducted there is way above our heads, we poor little German teacher and arts administrator couple.

Nevertheless, we remain huge fans of the space program. We found our way to the KSC with a GPS system in my BlackBerry, and we drove in a Toyota Prius. These are technologies that would not have existed without the space race.

One final curiosity: we have never seen and heard so many Germans in any American tourist attraction as we saw yesterday. We expect to hear a lot of Spanish in the U.S., but only occasionally German. Yet we were surrounded by Germans everywhere we turned–both families with small kids and older folks.

At first we understood this to be a reflection of the fact that the U.S. space program was mostly created by Germans in the 1950s and 1960s, led by Wernher von Braun, who had helped the Nazis with the V-1 rocket. Germans were essential to the development of space travel, and I’m sure this is a point of pride for Germans of our generation.

But later on, at dinner, we realized that this is also a very cheap vacation for Europeans. The Euro is currently worth over $1.50 U.S., so European tourists are probably going to be all over the major American tourist attractions this year. We, however, who are traveling to Europe this summer, will not be buying many souvenirs there.

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.

We had planned to fly out of Baltimore early on Saturday, March 15, and catch a home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Space Coast Stadium in Viera. But when we checked in and made it to the gate, we discovered that the plane designated for our flight was stuck on the ground in Columbus, Ohio, fogged in with zero visibility. There was no hope, we were told, that we would leave earlier than three hours late.

That, of course, would mean that we would miss the entire game against the Dodgers. But a gate change, and an apparent addition of a plane located in Baltimore, allowed us to leave earlier than we thought we would. So we flew to Orlando and got there without much trouble.

But then we wasted another half hour waiting for an apparently non-existent shuttle bus to the car rental agency. When we finally got our car (a Prius, much to our pleasant surprise), we drove straight to Viera, to Space Coast Stadium, and made it for the last two innings of the game. The Nats lost to the Dodgers 6-1, and we saw hardly any Nationals players we recognized, but we were there.

A stadium full of Nats and Dodgers fans had already enjoyed seven innings of the game when we got there. Our seats were very good, pretty much right behind home plate.

I have to admit, I don’t really know who is batting here. I got into the game so late I had no idea who was on the field. I didn’t get the lineup, and I’m sure it had changed two or three times before I got there. But this is a decent shot of an at-bat. the only player I’m sure of is former Nationals backup catcher Gary Bennett, who’s behind the plate for the Dodgers. This shot would be in the bottom of the 8th inning.

Because we saw veteran ex-manager Tommy Lasorda on the field for the Dodgers, and because we couldn’t see any of the regular Nats in the dugout, we assumed this was a split-squad game, with Dodgers manager Joe Torre and Nationals manager Manny Acta on the road with the other half of each team. But no, this was the only game the Dodgers and the Nats played yesterday. Still, it was a treat to see Lasorda relatively up-close.

Here are two people who are really relieved to finally be in Viera. One of the ticket-taker ladies at the gate in the stadium told us her daughter was stuck in Atlanta until Sunday night due to the extreme weather. The pilot of our flight must have flown far around northern Georgia’s terrible weather, because we didn’t suffer from much turbulence at all.

Since the Nats are playing Baltimore on Sunday at Fort Lauderdale–the farthest removed spring training camp from Viera–we chose instead to visit the Kennedy Space Center, about 40 minutes up the coast from our hotel in Melbourne. We’ll get back to all-baseball-all-the-time on Monday.

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun.

On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us.

Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing.

In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren’t sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session.

After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that a man had opened fire with a handgun on the Empire State Building’s observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws for the rampage.

America’s latest adventure in easily available firearms is, of course, the massacre at Virginia Tech. As I have mentioned, my wife and daughter, who had visited Blacksburg the day before, missed this one by about 18 hours.

The world press paid close attention to this shooting for a long time. It was front-page news in just about all the newspapers of the world for four or five days. As I write this, nine days after the attack, major papers in Germany, Austria, France, and other countries are still reporting the aftermath.

The one thing the world press has emphasized, without exception, is their absolute bafflement at the U.S. gun laws–or lack thereof. We are the laughingstock of the world in this department. People from civilized countries around the world look at the apparent American fascination with guns and cluck in disapproving astonishment. The unifying theme is something like this: how can a great country such as the U.S., the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, continue to allow this to happen?

After all these years and decades, I cannot come up with an answer. The National Rifle Association seems to have our congressional legislators in a deathgrip. One mass murder happens after another, all carried out with handguns or assault rifles, and yet nothing changes.

The morning after the Virginia Tech shootings, I heard Washington Post sports reporter John Feinstein on WTWP. I wish I could find a transcript of his remarks. Essentially what he said was this: when gun owners and gun fans complain about the inconvenience or unfairness of having to register these deadly weapons, he is sick of hearing about it. Since 9/11 we have been subject to a series of ever more humiliating and inconvenient searches of our persons and property at airports. Nobody really complains, because that’s just the way the world is.

Well, the world is also selling deadly handguns on the Internet to psychotic young men, who then commit mass murder. Couldn’t we endure just a little inconvenience to combat such madness?

I am very angry now at our American stupidity. I am angry at the weak will of the majority of Americans who want stronger gun controls, yet who will not raise hell with their congressmen or senators about it. I am embarrassed to have to try to explain to my European friends and colleagues why Americans are still allowed to buy and carry handguns.

The cartoonist Pat Oliphant has captured my sense of befuddlement and rage.

My daughter has been admitted to several universities, and she managed to narrow it down to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. Somewhat at the last minute, she decided she needed to see both campuses to make her final decision.

So on Saturday she and my wife drove down to Blacksburg from our suburban DC home, about a four-hour trip. They stayed near Blacksburg and then spent Sunday in Tech’s pre-orientation sessions.

Monday they had moved up Interstate 81 to JMU, but my daughter had pretty much decided that Tech was the place she wanted to attend. Standing on the campus Sunday, looking around, she began to see herself as a student there.

As I was walking back from the cafeteria in my high school on Monday, one of the Spanish teachers had his classroom TV on. There was a map of Virginia with the town of Blacksburg highlighted. I saw a graphic indicating “21 dead, 21 injured.” It didn’t take long for the news of the massacre to filter through, as well as the instruction from our administration that we were to keep TV sets off and not talk about the news in class.

Many students from our area attend Virginia Tech. It is one of the more competitive universities in the Virginia system. Hokie loyalty is more intense than that of alumni of other places. Hokie pain is now intense. To see Virginia Tech on the front page of all the world’s newspapers because of a rampage that wiped out 33 young lives is deeply disturbing.

My daughter will probably still attend Tech next year. She realizes that Tech is the place she saw on Sunday, not the crazy-man-land it became on Monday. But it will always be unsettling to walk the campus where the worst shooting massacre in American history took place.