We lived in Palm Beach County (Delray Beach and Boca Raton) from 1976-1984 and spent a fair amount of time exploring the area. Some places we liked are gone (Blood’s Hammock Groves, Jerry’s Pizza, Palm Beach Mall, IBM Boca Raton, and many more), but today, we visited a park that was established after we left and a garden we would have liked if only we’d known about it when we lived here!
We started the morning with a 5-mile round trip walk along A1A into MacArthur Beach Park, which was opened to the public in 1987. We didn’t have time to walk into the rest of the park, but the section along the road was very pretty.
Instead of a typical restaurant meal, I went to Publix and picked up sushi for a light lunch in our AirBnB. I’ve had much tastier supermarket sushi, but it sufficed to get us ready for our afternoon trip to Mounts Botanical Garden.
Mounts was opened in 1978, and we frequently visited friends who lived fairly near there, but I’d never heard of it before today. They usually are closed on Monday, but they are hosting Buddhist monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery on their Sacred Arts Tour and today was the opening ceremony. The monks are making a sand mandala which they will finish on Saturday morning…and then they’ll destroy it, because material life is impermanent.
The gardens are wonderful; there are twenty-five named gardens (we didn’t see them all), focusing on different aspects of the plant world, from fruits to vegetables to medicinal plants to landscaping for South Florida and much more. The gardens also have sculpture, both semi-permanent (like the moai below) and temporary (like the frog below, part of Ribbit the Exhibit II).
We left Mounts and headed to North Palm Beach for dinner at The Catch, a Peruvian mostly-seafood restaurant with a beautiful deck on the water. It would have been very photogenic if we hadn’t been busy eating!
After dinner, we returned to Singer Island in time to enjoy sunset from Cliff and Michael Ann’s deck overlooking the Lake Worth Lagoon.
