Day 3: West Palm Beach
Location: Miami, FL to West Palm Beach, FL
Today was beach day! We drove north from Miami, FL to the John D. MacArthur Beach State Park in West Palm Beach, FL. It is the only part of the local coast that hasn’t been lined up with private houses, hotels and resorts, probably because of the large estuary blocking access to the coast and that we crossed on foot on a wooden walkway. Birds live in the nearby mangroves and endangered sea turtles come to lay eggs on the park beach. A sign even warns about Crocodilians!
We enjoyed the slightly chilly waters for about an hour before we started to really feel the sun’s scorch and our stomachs growls. Even if it was only an entree and a shared dessert, we ate so much at our very late lunch that it would be our only meal of the day! It’s not a myth, food portion sizes really are out of control in the United States.
It looked like it was getting late in the afternoon to do anything else but thankfully we found out the Norton Museum of Art was having a late opening night with a Belgian Renaissance painting explanation and a live band playing traditional Jewish Klezmer and Jazz melodies with a modern twist. The average age of the public probably was both our ages combined but we still had a good time.
When we got back to our Airbnb place, we finally got the chance to hang out with our first host since the start of the trip. Both Marcia and her boyfriend Johnny are from Jamaica and after tonight we probably have our next year’s Holiday Road-Trip’s destination.
I forgot to mention the tire screeching shenanigans I did with the car U-turning on a quiet multi-lanes street while my girlfriend was encouraging me, the Ford Mustang really has too much horsepower for its own good, and ours too.
Continued next page.