Chuck and I had been heading south on I-95 since early that morning. We’d left out of Richmond just before sun-up in anticipation of the nearly 14-hour drive we had ahead of us. Now late in the afternoon, we both admitted that we were making pretty good time.

The sky had darkened, however, as soon as we crossed the Florida state line. And the rain followed a couple hours later when we were just outside of Jacksonville.

“I love your family, babe. I really do,” I began while putting down the issue of Vanity Fair I’d been reading since we last switched drivers and I had assumed occupancy of the passenger seat of our Passat. “But, seriously, why did your parents decide to move to Fort Myers?!”

“I don’t know, Jack,” Chuck began, with hurried breath, denoting his agitation at my constant complaining about the length of the drive. “They’re old. They’re retired. Old retired people move to south Florida. I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is.”

“Well. At least we won’t have to worry about spending the holidays shoveling snow,” I commented while tapping at the digital external temperature thermometer display mounted on the top of the rear view mirror. It read 69 degrees. “70 degrees in December. How can they even tell when it’s winter down here?”

“I dunno, Jack…” Chuck remarked again in his hushed, irritated tone. “But if this rain gets any heavier, I’m gonna have to pull over. I can hardly see as it is.”

The wipers on our Volkswagon SUV were at their maximum, squeaking and dragging their way back and forth across the windshield at a furious pace. Outside, the torrential patter of thousands of raindrops colliding simultaneously with the roof of our car created a sort of ambient drum-roll effect.

“Well, I’ll say this and then I’ll drop it: Next year, either your parents are coming to stay with us for the holidays… or we’re flying!”

“No argument from me there,” Jack responded, turning up the Air Conditioning to try to condense some of the moisture that was now heavily fogging up the lower half of the windshield.

Just as we saw the first sign for Orlando, the bottom dropped out. The rain began cascading in thick, heavy sheets that blanketed the windshield and overwhelmed the already at-maximum-capacity wipers.

“Shit!” Jack exclaimed, turning off the cruise control and coasting to a slower speed. “Oh this is ridiculous!”

“Just pull off and we’ll wait it out,” I replied, picking up the stack of magazines nestled next to the bag of road-trip junk food tucked beneath my feet.

Chuck put on his flashers and eased the Passat over into the emergency lane. The whooshing, rushing sounds of the downpour slapped and bashed against the sides of our car, gently rocking it with the force of the gales. “Geez… It’s almost kinda scary!”

“Yeah,” Jack responded, putting the gearshift into park and clicking the engine off as he turned down the blower for the air vents. He let out a breath of a defeated sigh.

“It’s not all that bad. Want a magazine?”

“No. I read through all of those while we were in South Carolina. I think I’ll just rest for a minute. Storms that come on like this usually blow over pretty fast.”

I could tell that Jack was beginning to cross over from that stage of just