When we awoke on Monday morning, the room had failed to brighten as much as my outlook on life, but we had bigger things on our minds. Our son had been talking about going to the beach and making a sand castle for weeks, if not months, and the day was finally here. We got ourselves dressed and covered in sun block, packed up our shovels and pail, and headed off to the beach.

Lido beach was easy to find and we had no trouble getting parking. It was an overcast day, and not many people were there. I suspect that to the locals the weather seemed horrible, but to us Hoosiers, it felt balmy and lovely. We hadn't dressed to swim, but we were able to fill the bucket with sand a few times and turn it over to make little towers. Our son loved it when we took the bucket down to the water and came back to pour the water over the sand. He would splash in the puddles, which, we would find, was the closest he would come to playing in the bay.

Soon we needed to leave to get ready to go to the first ball game of our trip. We went back to our hotel for a quick regroup before heading out to the ballpark. At the stadium, we found some free (and later, we would learn, not really allowed) parking across the street and walked over. We had lovely seats in the lower section on the first base side, and we got to see a slightly boring game. The Reds beat the Devilrays in unspectacular fashion.

Winter wanted to get up several times to walk around the park because, really, baseball is not exactly suited to holding a small child's attention, but he also played a little GameBoy while sitting on the ground in front of his seat, which not only allowed us to watch the game, but also made it much less likely that he would take a foul ball to the noggin.

The skies were overcast, so it wasn't overwhelmingly hot, and I came away with just a minor sunburn on my back in two small places where apparently I had not gotten enough sunblock. After the game, we went to Wal-Mart to try to get some of the things that would make our room feel a little less disgusting and little more livable.

It took a while to find the Wal-Mart, which would set the tone for us trying to find things in this area. We spent quite a while walking around the place collecting snack foods, dishwashing soap, and shower cleaner. We unpacked, and the place felt a tiny bit less nasty. Our vacation was finally really underway.