Hamptons at Boca Raton, FL Indoor Activities

Boca Raton Children's Museum, located inside a quaint home built by hand around 1913, unfurls an array of exhibits designed to feed children's creativity and enhance critical-thinking skills. Visitors venture to Dr. Dig's Back-Porch to learn about artifacts and fossils, stage dramas in a miniature theater with hand puppets, or head to the Faces Multicultural Room to play musical instruments and play dress-up with garments from around the world. They can also wheel pintsize shopping carts through a replica of Boca Raton's first grocery store, where orange juice was invented, or chart a course across the lawn's grasses aboard an outdoor pirate-ship fort. The museum has recently added a gift and snack shop, and also offers classes that teach nonverbal tots to use sign language and summer camps that provide opportunities for play and learning in a group setting.

The most recent addition to Paragon Theaters’ repertoire of upscale movie venues, Paragon Deerfield 8 Movie Theater cushions customers in the plush luxury of its newly renovated theaters. Stadium-style seats pad posteriors as their owners gaze upon the silver screens from clear vantage points. An expanded concessions menu sates the palates of moviegoers by presenting a range of hearty fare and, for those of age, beer and wine.

Sony HD digital projectors bathe the towering screens in crystal clearness, granting films a visual crispness so pronounced it has enabled sponsors to advertise their logos in actors' pores. The company plans additional upgrades and outdoor seating to bring all the amenities found in its locations in Miami, Florida, and Burnsville and Rochester, Minnesota, to the new Deerfield Beach location.

During the Superhero Scramble, racers of all fitness levels tear across arduous terrain littered with body- and mind-challenging obstacles. Participants must wade through mud and, to reach the finish line, persevere through a barrage of Super Slime generously donated by retired Ghostbusters.

Upon completing the race, athletes ride their endorphin high into a party stocked with ice-cold beer. There, they can mingle with other contestants, sway to live music, and see awards doled out to the fastest runners in each age bracket. Male and female Scramble Gamble contestants compete for a cash prize that can cover the cost of replacing the engines in their sneakers. The benefits of the race extend beyond the Gamble winners, too—the organizers donate 5% of each registration fee to charity.

At the Art Institute of Weston, master artist Conchita Firgau and her associate professors lead students of all ages in learning the classic style of European painting. Drawing on traditions of color, light, and composition practiced by Renaissance painters, Conchita and her staff give students the confidence and skill to develop their own style. But painting is not the only activity that goes on here. Photography classes help shutterbugs master digital cameras, and guitar classes use fun, easily digestible techniques to give more credibility to students’ air-guitar performances. The friendly studio also hosts after-school programs and camps to hone kids’ artistic talents.

Sunlight streams in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, bathing Erin Haag, her troupe of Power Pilates–certified instructors, and small-group exercisers in light as they tone cores and build muscle on the black Reformer machines. Pilates of Palm Beach’s titular Pilates classes stay true to Joseph Pilates’s six foundational principles, including focusing on executing each exercise with complete muscular control, initiating movements from your core, and paying complete attention to the exercise and nothing else, not even the gorilla in the middle of the room. Instructors also complement the Pilates classes with more peaceful yoga classes.

It's 1980-something. Glen, a young boy, dons a pair of glasses with one blue lens and one red, excited by this new technology that's supposed to make things on the screen pop out at you. During the next two hours, Glen ducks swooping avians during the revival of Alfred Hitchcock's ¬_The Birds_ in 3-D, terrified, yet thrilled. This is one of Glen Gray's earliest memories about the theater his father built more than 30 years ago. Today, Glen lives out those moments each day as the proprietor of Movies of Delray, where the projectors roll a medley of Hollywood features, and foreign, art-house, and independent films.

Gold walls and burgundy curtains lend to the lobby’s art-deco air, and a large chandelier illuminates more than 60 pencil drawings of movie icons of yore, such as John Wayne, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe. This old-fashioned lobby disguises the updates within: brand-new bathrooms, granite countertops at the concession stand, and in the theaters themselves, digital surround sound and updated seating. Rows of black leather seats cushion moviegoers with high backs and wide benches so cozy that Glen claims guests have fallen asleep in them, only waking up at the end of the picture or when Bruce Willis turns out to have been a metaphor all along.

In celebration of film, professor Shelly Isaacs graces the theater with screenings of obscure Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated foreign films. After each screening, he discusses the film with audiences, dissecting and analyzing the cinematography, characters, and plot.