Assuming you don’t have to stay home cradling a trembling dog in your lap, it’s worth considering that Saturday night’s fireworks get more spectacular the farther south you drive. You can limit the holiday traffic exposure to an hour and a half and still make it to a relatively big city with relatively big-budget display.
West Palm’s Fourth on Flagler celebration offers a really spectacular show rising over the tax base that pays for it. The fireworks are launched from a barge in the Intracoastal and the free public street party along Flagler Drive takes place just a thin bridge away from the one-percenter paradise of Palm Beach mansions and moored mega-yachts.
What could be more American than that? Well, maybe the fact that those mansions edge another public space not everyone knows about: Lake Trail, a beautifully maintained six-mile bike path. Considered among the best rides in South Florida, the trail skirts the mansions’ backyards and the sea wall along the Intracoastal all the way to the northernmost tip of the island where there’s a nice dock and water fountains.
You can pedal along Ocean Boulevard on the way back and make the full circumference of the island of Palm Beach. Toss your wheels in the SUV or rent them at the Palm Beach Bicycle Trail Shop. The website floridarambler.com suggests parking next to the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, a gorgeous Beaux-Arts mansion built by the Palm Beach railroad magnate. The museum will be open on the Fourth of July from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., its normal hours of operation (Sundays 12 to 5). Or you can park on the streets north of Royal Poinciana Way.
If you didn’t see enough fireworks on the Fourth of July, you can always take your partner to “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venue,” the one-man show on national tour playing next weekend at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse. John Frusciante stars and no, he’s not the former guitarist with Red Hot Chili Peppers; he’s a stand-up comic from New Jersey. The show opens Friday July 10 and runs through Sunday, July 12.
While you’re on the website, you might want to pick up tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld appearing at Kravis in October. His February appearance at Melbourne’s King Center was a sell-out, and we hear it was great.
And if your dog is content to cower under the couch, you can slip out to the Mike Block String Camp’s Barn Dance Saturday at First Presbyterian Church. The camp’s star-studded faculty of folk, Celtic and Americana musicians will join the camp’s students, who give a concert starting at 3 p.m. that same day The faculty performed alone last Wednesday; they will give two more concerts with advanced students, one Wednesday and another Friday, both starting at 7:30 p.m.
Best-selling non-fiction author Robert Kurson has come out with a new book, “Pirate Hunters,” and next Thursday, July 9, he’s coming to the Vero Beach Book Center to promote it. Subtitled “Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship,” the book will pique the interest of local treasure hunters and anyone who heads out to the beach with a metal detector after every big storm.
It’s also likely to intrigue the pirate buffs out there. He’s got some interesting details about just how they’ve changed, and how wrong Hollywood got it (they were less likely to say “arrgh” than “ahoy.” Like the cookie – arrgh.)
Kurson, a Harvard Law School graduate who has written for Esquire and Rolling Stone, is best known for his 2004 book, “Shadow Divers,” the true story of an American dive team which pursued an unknown object on the floor of the ocean 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. It turned out to be a German U-boat, but no one knew anything about an incident that would explain how it got there. The ensuing seven-year effort, complete with marriages destroyed and lives lost, is chronicled in Kurson’s book, which was on the New York Times Bestsellers list for 24 weeks and peaked at No. 2.
One of those divers, John Chatterton, returns in “Pirate Hunters,” and teaming up with a new diver, a former bodyguard named John Mattera, they go in search of sunken galleons. They learn via another treasure hunter of an English captain who stole the boat he was in charge of, the Golden Fleece. Chatterton and Mattera are charged with finding it. Their search begins in the waters off Santo Domingo but the search expands.
Another book in 2008, “Crashing Through,” expands on Kurson’s award-winning Esquire article about a blind champion skier who in middle age has his sight restored through a stem cell transplant, a feat which throws up a whole new hillside of hurdles.
Kurson begins his Book Center presentation at 6 p.m.