The road to Tallahassee

We have a night off and are in a Tallahassee hotel. On the way here, we drove on smaller roads from Orlando, where last night's show was. The plan was at first to get a room on the way to Tallahassee in a small town that would be within 20 miles or so to a beach we could go to tomorrow. Looking at an atlas, the town of Perry looked like a good candidate. It turned out not to be when we drove through it. No hotel options that we could see, and no food that looked like we wanted to be eating it. We kept moving toward Tallahassee.
On our way, a tremendous thunderstorm hit, the likes of which none of us had experienced in quite some time. A storm of storms that lit up the trees and created patterns on the windshield that looked like flecks in galvanized steel and were continually erased by the wiper blades and created anew twice every second. We pulled off into gas station in a riverside town amidst the torrents and talked to the blond girl behind the counter who smiled when she spoke. She said she'd be walking a mile to her house in a wetsuit when she got off at 6 in the morning. Said that where she lived was waist-deep in flood and that she'd be wading home. We got back in the van and drove another hour into town.