Boca Raton Beach Barbeque

Fort Lauderdale – 14 kilometres walked, 25 kilometres by car, 53 kilometres by train, 3 metres swam

The morning low of 14 degrees Celsius froze Floridians to the bone. I’d been invited to join Stillman and his family for a beach barbeque in Boca Raton and during my long walk and bus ride to the Tri-Rail train station, I saw people wearing sweaters, long pants, jackets, gloves, and one guy had a damn toque on his head. I’ve had no use for long pants for quite a while now so I was wearing shorts, my awesome tie-dyed Sailorman shirt, and a long-sleeved white button-up shirt over top. I declined when a rando in a passing vehicle offered me a blankie.

 

I arrived at Stillman’s door 45 minutes ahead of schedule after an enjoyable $5 train ride. Surprisingly, there are two separate train systems in this area – the high speed Brightline and the slower one I took called Tri-Rail. On it were all sorts of riders – business people wearing suits (even on a Saturday), students carrying rucksacks, kids with scooters and bikes, and folks that looked to be on the lower end of the social scale, including one guy I couldn’t help staring at who had a set of dentures with gold teeth in his hand and was picking bits of old Poli-Dent from the plate and between the teeth, rolling them up into little balls, and flicking them on the floor, ready for parasitic attachment to somebody’s shoe tread. I watched as he finished then rubbed the grill on his dirty jeans for a final cleaning, pulled a tube of fresh adhesive from his pocket, applied several strings of paste along the inner gumline, shoved them into his mouth, then looked over at me, and I swear there was a single sparkle dazzle from a golden incisor and a ding noise as he smiled at me and winked.

 

Stillman showed me around their cool and spacious apartment which features, yes, a Christmas tree, and large decorated Yuletide wooden letters on their table lined up to spell “JOY” which I artfully rearranged to say “YOJ” then asked the girls if that was some sort of special Florida celebration. They immediately recognized my childish sense of humour and accepted me as one of their own. Stillman then took me and their eldest daughter for the short drive to the Publix to pick up supplies for the barbeque, including fresh Wahlburgers and a brand new meat temperature probe which would later be cleverly employed by the girls in checking the readings on the interiors of their sand piles on the beach. My young accomplice called me over and showed me a box of Kinder chocolate Santa Clause treats where somebody had pressed their thumb into one of the heads and squashed it. We laughed uproariously!

Boca Raton beach and the adjoining park was simply lovely. And I think the way they keep it lovely is by charging the public $50/day to park, but giving massively subsidized rates to locals. We carried 700 kilos (1543 pounds) of gear down to the beach then plopped down and relaxed. Well, we didn’t relax for long as the girls are at the stage of their lives where a minute not spent petitioning an adult to join them in an activity is a minute wasted. So we all kept busy with the little ladies swimming, walking, building sand art, opening coconuts, getting buried in sand, kicking a ball around, and yet somehow throughout this activity, Ester managed to spot two manatee just offshore cruising down the coast. Morning manatee is back!

 

We had a break for lunch in the park and enjoyed charcoal flared organic and grass-fed beef burgers, then balanced out that advertised healthiness with a bunch of roasted marshmallows (vegan marshmallows, the package claimed, but I don’t know how any version of marshmallow could be anything than treacherous for one’s health). The food was delicious and the surroundings serene with palm trees, leafy trees, nature paths, and very few people. The girls invited me for a game of soccer with modified rules – to score a goal you had to kick the ball into a tree trunk. Any tree trunk. And no blocking. Simplified, yes. Super fun? Absolutely. We had a great time together.

 

We returned to the beach after lunch to enjoy more of the glorious sun, sand, and ocean. The hours melted away and after the short drive home we wrapped up the visit with sipping rum and Cokes on their balcony overlooking the neighbourhood lights with the salt-tinged, warm Florida breeze cooling off our sun-braised skin. It was a fine day indeed.

 

I returned to Fort Lauderdale by about 9pm and Las Olas was heaving in an orgiastic Christmas extravaganza. The restaurants were packed, bars were overfull, music played from all directions, and people wore their finest clothes. The young Kris inside of me immediately thought, “Yeah, let’s find a bar, sit down for a drink, and enjoy all this wondrous activity, and maybe get caught up in an all-night drinking session,”  but then the middle-aged Kris slapped the young one right across the face, knocking him flat, and caught a bus back to the boat to avoid the last 30 minutes of walking, ate a can of Dollar Tree’s $1 tamales purchased for provisions testing, had a call with my beautiful wife, then collapsed in the darkness, peace, and solitude of the v-berth.