Day 344: Let's go Dodgers let's go!

The last leg of our trip, the home-stretch, the 3 weeks that we'll spend in America before returning home began – as all things should in LA – with a bang. One of my best friends in living here now and she came with a friend to pick us up from the airport and whisked us out to a small and incredibly busy cafe with one of the most vast array of pastries I've ever seen (but as it turned out, this is more a measure of the short time I'd spent in LA than the actually vastness of pastry goodness available)

Following our brunch, almost as quickly as we could take our bags out of the boot of one car we were sitting in another and were on our way to one of America's most iconic sporting stadiums. It was Sunday afternoon and we were weaving our way through 6-wide lanes of traffic, through wide palm-lined streets and past high-rise blocks to the Dodgers Stadium for one of the first games of the season.

The car park was huge – a sea of shining bonnets filled the grounds right up to the hills where “think blue” was written in the “hollywood” style and everyone around was certainly thinking blue, and wearing blue, and waving blue, and buying blue under the clear blue skies. Our first task was to find tickets and, once we'd found the vendors, decipher the seating code; was outfield better than reserve? Where was the pavilion? And what did loge mean? In amongst all of this a very friendly man gave us a set of tickets that he wasn't using that would allow us, once inside, to upgrade seat right behind the batter. Awesome.

On entry, everyone was handed a dodgers blanket that turned out to be a slanket (they call them snuggies here – a blanket with sleeves) which was of no use in the glorious sunshine of the first innings but absolutely vital in the closing stages of the game. Everyone around us was chanting and cheering and balancing huge trays of natchos/chips/”dodger dogs” (foot-long hot dogs) and in between innings music blared and the big screen scanned the audience for “smile cam” “dance cam” and “kiss cam” - it was basically, just like the movies.

We all stood for the second rendition of the national anthem and the “7^th Innings Stretch” - which is kind of like half time...but with a stadium-wide rendition of the apparently well-known Take me to the ball-game which everyone waved their hands and belted out like a kind of second-national anthem. People-watching aside the game was great too; luckily Natalie had brought along a few friends to help explain exactly what was going on...and the Dodgers won!

What a day! We'd been on America soil less than 12 hours and already we'd been part of a truly American experience, and it felt good. Who knows what's ahead of us if we carry on at this rate...