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.

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.

The dam is on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. (We like to tell our friends that we walked to Arizona–across the dam.) It created Lake Mead, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, and it provides irrigation water and electric power to a good portion of the southwestern United States.

The dam is reached by one road and one road only: U.S. Highway 93, which runs through Boulder City, Nevada to the river.

Highway 93 is a two-lane road that goes right over the Hoover Dam. On the advice of the guide books, we got there rather early in the morning. Good thing, too: when we left shortly after noon, the backup on 93 was probably three to four miles long.

To alleviate congestion, a multi-lane bypass bridge is being built over the river, just downstream from the Hoover Dam. This bypass project was originally scheduled to open in 2008, but the collapse of some tower cranes caused the completion to be delayed until 2010.

The bridge infrastructure looks very impressive. The bridge will span the canyon high above the river, as opposed to the current Highway 93, which of course goes across the top of the dam. Here are some of the Nevada-side bridge supports for the Hoover Dam Highway.

We parked our car and walked down toward the dam. It is not that wide, but goes very deep into the canyon. It is a concrete arch-gravity structure.

Looking down into the canyon on the downstream side was rather scary for two people who are mildly afraid of heights. The power plant is at the bottom of the dam. It produces on average more than 4.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year–most of it sent to Southern California. That’s a lot of Hollywood Klieg lights!

On the lake side of the dam are four towers that look like Art Deco sculptures of some kind. They are the intake towers for the hydroelectric plant. They take water from Lake Mead and run it through the turbines at the bottom of the dam to create those 4.5 billion megawatts a year.

You can see from the lighter-colored layer of the canyon walls that the water level in Lake Mead is somewhat lower than its maximum. (This color-leaching reminded me of Red Rock Canyon, actually.) But there are rainy seasons sometimes, and the level of the lake can rise. What happens to extra water when that happens? Well then it goes around the dam to the downstream side via two spillways. These work along with the intake towers to divert excess water downstream. Here is the spillway on the Arizona side.

Several times during our Vegas week we remarked that the city felt like a beach town without the waterfront. So where do Las Vegans go to the beach? Well, they could drive four or five hours to the Pacific Ocean, or they could drive a half hour and get to Lake Mead. The Lake Mead Recreation Area is where Las Vegans go to swim, boat, and generally enjoy the water.

In the places where I grew up, these man-made recreation areas were fairly common. Lake Norman, on the Catawba River north of Charlotte, NC, is the one I know best. Lake Mead, however, is the mother of all man-made lakes. When we flew home from Vegas, Barbara gave me the window seat. I could see just how huge Lake Mead was, until the canyons and gorges of the Colorado River became the Grand Canyon, miles upstream from the Hoover Dam and the lake it created.

One final note: the name of the Hoover Dam was actually a point of some controversy in the mid-20th century. The project was undertaken during the administration of President Herbert Hoover, and was completed under Franklin Roosevelt.

When the U.S. Congress authorized the project, it was originally called the Boulder Canyon Project. The dam was first planned to be built in Boulder Canyon, but as the design developed, it moved to Black Canyon because it was easier to block the river there. The dam, however, kept the name Boulder Dam as the project got underway.

Hoover’s Secretary of the Interior changed the name of the dam to Hoover Dam in September 1930, as Hoover was preparing his re-election campaign. After Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the 1932 election, Harold Ickes, the new Secretary of the Interior, issued a memorandum in 1933 asking the Bureau of Reclamation (the office responsible for the dam) to refer to it as the Boulder Dam. In legislation signed by President Harry S Truman, Congress restored the name Hoover Dam in 1947.

The town closest to the dam is Boulder City, Nevada. I had the impression that many locals still tend sometimes to refer to it as the Boulder Dam. Since we flew to Las Vegas out of Washington National Airport (and not Reagan National Airport, the name imposed on it by a Republican Congress), I can understand why locals might want to use the dam’s original name!

Red Rock Canyon is just on the western edge of Las Vegas. It is reached by driving straight out Charleston Boulevard to the west, until there is no more Charleston Boulevard. As the road continues into the hills, one enters the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Just a few minutes after the straight road began to curve, we realized that we were in real, live desert.

The first thing we saw on the 13-mile loop road was the Calico Hills trail. The reason for the name is obvious: the contrast between red and beige rock. This is really a canyon. It was hard to believe how small people looked from above when they walked down the canyon trail. This picture shows only the top portion of the trail, but it really went quite deep into the rocks.

These boulders are formed from ancient sand dunes. The lighter-colored layers show where water leached out all the color (copper?) from the rocks. The effect is very striking, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We are fans of the sci-fi spoof movie Galaxy Quest. At one point on the road, we became convinced that the makers of that movie must have gotten the idea for their rock-monster from these boulders at Red Rock Canyon.

It was a bit hard for us to wrap our minds around the untouched beauty of this desert in such close proximity to the city of Las Vegas. Then we looked at a map and realized it is 17 miles away from town. Here are some of the mountains that rim the Las Vegas valley. (Incidentally, the name of the town means “the meadows,” and refers to the verdant valley early travelers found on their way to the Pacific.)

After having visited the canyon on our second day in town, we became much more aware of the sunset over the western hills each afternoon. This was our first view of that sun settling behind the hills, from close up.

These ancient sand dunes, these calico boulders, were our introduction to the overwhelming force of nature in the desert southwest. Later in the week we would see how humans in the 20th century absolutely conquered a portion of the natural landscape.

We’ll continue our pilgrimage of endangered hotels by going down Las Vegas Boulevard South. The one hotel that seems in most imminent danger of implosion is the Saraha, on the north end of what’s considered the Strip.

This hotel is a weird combination of themes. Obviously, the basic concept is a faux-Egyptian motif. But inside, the area off the main casino floor is devoted to a NASCAR theme, with real racing stock cars on the floor and a kiddie-midway of racecar simulations. The Amazing Jonathan performs there, as do a couple of musical acts.

The loop in the picture is the final flip of the roller coaster that begins inside the hotel. On the Thursday of our trip, this coaster got stuck right after coming out of the loop. This snafu made the local TV news, as well as some national TV coverage.

Another old standby on the north Strip is the Riviera. This is located between the construction site for a fabulous new hotel-resort and a rather low-end shopping strip. We found the casino somewhat average and unimpressive, but the Riviera remains a major feature of the north Strip, directly across from Circus Circus.

In mid-strip, next to Harrah’s, is the Imperial Palace. This hotel has a faux-Chinese theme, and looks a bit like a Chinese restaurant, at least at its main entrance.

This hotel is rather hard to get into, at least from the Strip. It has a monorail stop in back, but on the Las Vegas Boulevard side the entrance is nearly invisible. The most distinctive feature we noticed–which may or may not be an actual part of the hotel–is the disco-bar in front that advertises itself as the place where it is easiest to get laid in Vegas. So I guess you would say it’s a pickup bar.

On the south end of the Strip is the 50-year-old Tropicana. It has the longest-running production show in Vegas, the Folies Bergere. We saw the show and were unimpressed with the performances, although the technical spectacle was quite imposing, and the featured comedy juggler, Michael Holly, was fantastic.

One other south Strip hotel of note, whose demise is actually immediately visible, is the Aladdin. While it has not been demolished, it really is no longer the Aladdin, since it is undergoing a transition to a Planet Hollywood. When we were there, the signage on the front of the hotel actually made the whimsical-feature section of the local TV news. For a couple of days, this hotel was known as the “Planet Ho.”

We also delved into the downtown Las Vegas area of Fremont Street known as Glitter Gulch. Before there was a Strip, there were hotel-casinos downtown. According to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch site, a couple of these hotels are in danger of being sold and then possibly “converted” or destroyed.

Possibly the most familiar of these would be Binion’s, whose official name is “Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel.” Before it was sold to MTR Gaming in 2004, it was known as Binion’s Horseshoe. Binion’s is a casino for serious gamblers. Its poker room is most directly accessible through a rear door, open to the public but hidden from the pedestrian walkway on Glitter Gulch. You might know the name Binion’s because the World Series of Poker, seen on TV, used to be staged there.

The hotel whose demolition would be most disquieting is the Golden Gate. This is located at the corner of Fremont and Main Streets, and is the oldest hotel in Vegas. It was established in 1906.

When we walked into its casino we got an immediate feeling of being in the old West. The ceiling is low, with ceiling fans; there are no frills; there is a lot of dark wood. On the wall of the casino is a replica of the first telephone in Las Vegas, whose number was 1. It was the telephone of the Golden Gate Hotel.

I apologize for the lousy photograph. All the pictures of the downtown hotels were taken with my cell phone’s camera. I stupidly left my Canon PowerShot in the hotel room when we went downtown.

We were glad to have seen all these “heritage” hotels. I think the demise of the downtown hotels would be the most distressing, since they carry so much of the history of Las Vegas.

I have just accomplished more in 10 minutes of frantic blogging in the airport than I could in a whole week of trying to use the frustratingly slow and bandwidth-limited hotel WiFi.

Thanks, McCarran Airport!

According to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch, re-development will probably doom most of these hotels at some point in the near future. I already mentioned the recent demise of the Stardust, whose rubble I can see directly from my hotel window while typing this.

Here is the defunct sign of the Stardust, still standing behind the barrier that separates the curious public from the continuing work of hauling away debris.

The pile of debris from the demolition was the thing most visible from the window of our hotel room. Here it is looking through the fence, just past the sign depicted above.

As we walked down the Strip toward the defunct Stardust, we passed a very impressive sign. This is the sign from the old Westward Ho–which apparently was not all that impressive a hotel. The sign sure is cool, though.

Down the Strip from these two ruins is the Frontier (currently called the New Frontier). This has, as you can tell, a Western theme. Gilley’s nightclub offers mud wrestling every evening. It looked somewhat cheesy and sleazy from the outside, but inside it was rather charming. (Barbara was not waiting for the mud wrestling, but rather for me to snap the picture and move on up the Strip.)

We experienced our first Las Vegas buffet here, a breakfast buffet. As we were standing in line for the buffet, I noticed this interesting sign, which tells you a lot about the Las Vegas economy. They use U.S. money, but they also seem to have their own.

There are more “heritage” hotels to be reported on, but I’ll do that when I get home. This is being typed and posted in McCarran Airport, which has better WiFi than the hotel did.

We’ve been overwhelmed in our first 18 hours here. Too much to see and experience. We are staying in a Hilton Grand Vacation resort hotel on the Strip, which is really a resort hotel and not a casino place. There’s a lovely pool with a bar downstairs, similar to the place we stayed in Aruba 10 years ago, but there’s no restaurant nor casino.

We have tickets for three shows (Mac King, Lance Burton, and Crazy Horse Paris), but otherwise no specific plans. We reached a point of Strip-fatigue, and our trip had no focus until this morning. Curious about that ugly pile of rubble three lots over from our hotel, we did some investigating and discovered that it is the ruin of the legendary Stardust hotel and casino, one of the first hotels on the Strip.

The Stardust was demolished on March 13 to make way for something called the Echelon. (Thanks to The Strip Podcast for this, plus fantastic video of the demolition.) I am very sorry to have missed seeing that place. It closed last year and is now gone forever.

Further googling and digging led to the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch page, which has a list of hotels in Vegas that are in danger of being converted to huge non-kitschy modern highrises. Now our trip has a focus.

We just agreed that we should be looking at as many of these classic hotels as we can, both on the Strip and downtown. After we see Mac King’s show today, we will take a closer look at Harrah’s, as well as the Riviera and the Sahara.

Pictures will follow. The hotel’s WiFi connection is not fast, but it does seem to work just fine.