Brightline starts closing railroad crossings today

Florida's annual Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday runs Monday, July 20 through Thursday, August 20, 2026 — a full month to stock up without paying sales tax. Clothing, footwear, wallets and qualifying bags priced $100 or less per item are tax-free, along with certain school supplies priced $50 or less per item and learning aids and jigsaw puzzles priced $30 or less. The biggest ticket: personal computers and certain computer accessories priced $1,500 or less qualify when purchased for noncommercial home or personal use. A few things to know before you shop: phones, video game consoles, rentals, and repairs are excluded, and purchases made at theme parks, public lodging establishments, or airports do not qualify.

Muse & Mingle: Summer Lovin' takes over the Boca Raton Museum of Art on Thursday, July 16, starting at 5 p.m. The museum bills it as an evening of art, music, and community connection built for summer nights, which is the polite way of saying it is the version of a gallery visit where you can hold a drink and talk to people instead of reading wall text in reverent silence. It is a smart use of a Thursday in the middle of July, when the alternative is the inside of your own house and the air conditioning bill that comes with it.

The quieter museum option comes first. On Wednesday, July 15 at 1 p.m., the Boca Raton Museum of Art runs an Art in Focus tour built around two works: Frank Stella's The Quarter-Deck and Miriam Schapiro's Heart in the Highlands. The premise is narrow on purpose. Rather than marching through the galleries, the tour slows down and stays with a small number of pieces long enough for them to actually open up. If you have walked past both of these a dozen times without stopping, this is the hour that fixes that.

Friday, July 17 at 8 p.m., Yvad & The Legal Roots bring the music of Bob Marley to the Mizner Park Amphitheater as part of the Summer in the City series. Outdoor reggae in South Florida in the middle of July is either exactly the right pairing or a stress test of your relationship with humidity, and the answer usually depends on whether the sun has fully gone down by the time the band gets going. It has. Go anyway. The amphitheater is at its best on a night like this, with the crowd loose and the sound carrying out across the park.

If Friday's reggae is the sweaty option, Saturday is the tailored one. The Wick Theatre stages Bublé & Beyond on July 18 at 7:30 p.m., an evening of Michael Bublé alongside the standards made famous by the legendary crooners who came before him. The Wick pitches it as timeless sophistication, and for once the marketing copy is not far off the mark. Seats, air conditioning, someone in a very good suit holding a very long note. In a week heavy on outdoor sweat and railroad detours, there is something to be said for that.

The room runs hot Wednesday through Saturday. The Flyers open on July 15, mixing originals with covers of classic hits on a circuit that has taken them all over South Florida. Good Bread follows Thursday the 16th, a blues rock band built around tributes to the icons. Friday the 17th belongs to THE LONG RUN, reproducing the sound of the iconic classic rock bands. Spiral Light closes it out Saturday the 18th with its own trip through the legacy of rock and roll. Four nights, four different flavors of the same basic promise, all within a short drive of wherever you are reading this.

Saturday morning, July 18 at 10 a.m., the Boca Raton Museum of Art runs Morning Makers: Sculpting the Surface, a hands-on sculpting and art-making session built for families. It is the kind of thing that sounds mild on paper and turns out to be the part of the weekend everybody actually remembers, mostly because it involves getting your hands dirty in a building where the usual rule is do not touch anything. Ninety-degree Saturdays are long. A museum with air conditioning and a project to finish is a genuinely good way to spend part of one.