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.

Sunday morning I wake up in the guest room at Mike and Laurie's apartment. I was feeling exhausted and groggy. The apartment was silent, so I was very cautious as I tried out my failiing voice. I needn't have worried about waking anyone up though: I had no voice at all. It wasn't that it hurt to talk; it was that I physically could not. We got up relatively early, 6 a.m. or so, and turned on the t.v. in our room to entertain Winter. We tried to keep the volume down so as not to wake up Keigan in the adjacent room, but she did start crying a while later. I hoped it was her normal wake up time.

We got ourselves around and dressed and went downstairs. Winter announced that he wanted to go for a walk, so he and I went out to stroll around the neighborhood while Jon finished packing up our room and taking stuff out to the car. Winter and I walked until he didn't want to walk anymore, which if you know Winter, is impressive. I had to whisper anything that I wanted to say, and Winter always whispered back, thinking that I was implying he had to be quiet. When we got back to the house, Mike made us a lovely breakfast and soon we were facing another 8-hour drive the rest of the way to Sarasota, Florida.

I felt pretty bad for this part of the drive. Not only was my voice gone, but my nose had started to stuff up, and I was still very tired. Talking in the car was almost impossible, so I felt useless for helping to keep Jon awake. I nodded off a few times, and after what felt like forever, we were at the Florida border, stopping for some free orange and grapefruit juice.

We'd forgotten to prepare Winter for the concept of the vistor's bureau and the specialness of the orange juice, so when we went in and asked him if he wanted some, he said “no, I want apple juice!”, to which the Florida orange juice woman made a half-hearted attempt to hide a sneer. The Welcome Center was in the middle of reconstruction, and a bunch of it had been closed off or torn up. There was pretty much no where to go except into one big room, and the lovely area out back that we remembered relaxing under the trees was all gone. Maybe when it's all done being remodeled it'll be nice, but for now, a big thumbs-down for the Florida Welcome Center.

Back on the road, it seemed like the trip would never end. Winter started saying that he hurt his foot, and was clearly in actual pain. He was, like us, also tired and sore from being in the car too much, and it was not much consolation to any of us to tell him “just three more hours.” By the end, the drive had been so awful, I just couldn't see how we were possibly going to make the trip back.

But finally, our motel appeared. My experience with motels is that they are never as nice as you hope they will be, so I was trying to prepare myself for it to be really awful. The drive had been so long that I knew there was nothing we'd be able to do about the room that night at least, no matter how bad it was. From the outside, the place looked OK. We'd seen some real dumps along the way, so it was a relief to note that the neighborhood appeared to be OK, the outside of the building looked well kept, and a handful of respectable-looking people were sitting out by the pool.

The room itself, though.

We walk in, and there are clearly one or two pictures missing from the wall. We pull the bedspreads off the beds, and the sheets have dark circles on them. Winter is so exhausted, I lay him on one of the beds, but the pillowcase is so dingy that I worry that I shouldn't have. The shower walls were just grody. It was a dark, dark moment, and I really didn't know what to do. Like I said, I knew there just wasn't anything we could do about it that evening. We didn't have the energy to try to find any place else, and we had no way of knowing what would be better. Plus, I know that after such a long, horrible drive, that I don't have the best attitude in the world.

We go out to dinner at Perkins, come back to plug with tissues the mysterious holes in the wall, go to bed, and hope to awake with a brighter perspective on what had, so far, been a less than fantastic vacation.

After literally months of planning, the day of the big spring training vacation was finally upon us. My husband Jon and I had been up to late in the night to finish packing the car and preparing the house for our two-week trip.

An 8-hour drive is really way too much, and it's even worse when you know that you have another 8-hour drive stalking you the next day. I had already been scratchy of throat for the previous couple of days, but the 4-hour night's sleep plus the stress of the drive did a weird number on my body, and by the time we arrived at Jon's brother's house around 3 p.m., I had almost no voice left. By that evening, I could hardly talk at all. I felt OK: no fever or anything like that, but I still wasn't sure whether I should handle their 5-month old baby girl. I wanted to see Keigan, but I'd hate to give her her first case of laryngitis. Her parents didn't seem concerned, though, and she *does* get passed around to a whole lot of people in her little life, so I figured that my hoarsness was probably not going to do her in.

It was interesting at Mike and Laurie's house. The NCAA tournament games were on, but one of the first things Mike and Laurie announced was that the baby wasn't supposed to watch t.v. Since she was playing in the room where the t.v. was on, this rule seemed to be enforced with half-hearted attempts to draw her attention the other direction and slight admonishments when she looked at the television. I wasn't sure how to respond, since at 5 months I'm confident that she could not have told the difference between the television at that distance and something that she was allowed to look at. However, I know that when my son Winter was that little that we felt funny about letting him watch t.v., so maybe they just say she's not allowed to make themselves feel better. Or maybe it was for our benefit, like we would judge them for letting her watch t.v. Far be it from us: we'd hooked up a television in the car for Winter to watch during the drive!

Mike and Laurie made us a lovely dinner from scratch and everything, which I didn't get to enjoy as much as I would have liked, since by that point I was violently tired and almost completely unable to speak. I'd taken to whispering to Jon who would then relay my sentiment if necessary or, if not, just chuckle or respond however he felt was appropriate, leaving the rest of the room to ponder what I might have said. I went to bed early; Jon stayed up as late as he could to watch games with his brother.

It was a long, boring, exhausting day, filled with wierd health issues and a cranky 3-year old in the back seat. So far, it was not the wonderful, relaxing, life-changing event that I'd been hoping for. But I knew that we were paying our dues early and that things would get better. If we could survive the drive, that is.