Dodgers everywhere!

Even when I'm not even close to LA, I had some Dodgers related encounters during USA visits.

Van Ramblings of a Dutch Dodger

Dodgertown 2006
It wasn't on my itinerary, but when the road signs said 'Vero Beach' I had to go and take a peek. It was in November so there wasn't much action. As it turned out it was one of the last winters before the last Dodgers Spring Training in Florida. Good timing!
It felt weird to pass the VB Dodgers gates onto a piece of land that had been Dodger Town for so long. No groundsmen were active, not a soul kept me from going into Holman Stadium. It was a ghostlike experience. Not soon after I visited Vero Beach, the lights went out in Dodger Town for good.

Van Ramblings of a Dutch Dodger

Van Ramblings of a Dutch Dodger

Brooklyn 2008
I'd been to NYC but never off Manhattan Island. It was time to expand my horizon, so I visited Brooklyn. Great place. Very New York City, but it has a tranquil quality. And the neighbourhoods sound easy: Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Crown Heights, almost Bostonian. I strolled through Prospect Park and on my way to the subway found this mural. I don't have a lot with the Dodgers pre-LA, that's so long ago, but I felt proud when I saw the painting and it felt like the people from Brooklyn never recovered from their move to the West Coast.
At the end of my walk along the boardwalk of Coney Island I visited the stadium of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a nice little park that's flanked by a bigger than life statue of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese.

Van Ramblings of a Dutch Dodger

Portland 2010
Okay, this may be stretching it, but when I visited America's biggest book store I went straight for the baseball section and to my surprise found a hard copy of 'Out of the Blue'. Hadn't seen any of those, ever! I also got a nice hard copy of 'Koufax a lefty's Legacy'. So a little bit of Blue in that trip after all.

Lights out!

So, I had a case of (what turned out to be) Transient Global Amnesia a few weeks back. My lights went out, I fell and for about 5 hours no new memories were imprinted in my brain. Funny thing is that I was able to call my girlfriend, walk to the doctor, talk to her and walk to the hospital afterwards (or so my girlfriend, who was with me, tells me). They did all kinds of tests on me (no, not THAT kind of tests :)), got blood samples, tapped some spinal fluid, did a brain wave scan and an MRI. I spend the night there and left the next day feeling better than I’ve felt in months. Two weeks later I had to report back to the neurologist for test results. All was well, no weird stuff but there was something off on the MRI. Nothing serious and I never would have known about it if I didn’t had that MRI. So, what did they find? A water filled cyst behind my left eye socket that has been there since before I was born. Where my brain was supposed to be, was a body of water!

Van Ramblings of a Dutch Dodger

How weird! This doesn’t mean I miss a piece of brain (but I’m not sure, lol!). I realized I don’t have a, what we call wiskundeknobbel (mathematics bump :)). Instead, I have a water dent. It didn’t take me long to give it meaning. Most of the time water is blue (in a child’s drawing, along the sandy beaches of Maui). Blue is also the color of my favourite baseball team, so now I can scientifically explain why I’m a Dodgers fan: I was born that way!