(Fort Lauderdale) “I’m going to have to turn the car around, we won’t be able to get to…”
There are some phrases in life you don’t want to hear, and at the top of the list is this one, especially if it comes from the guy driving your Uber in Florida .
But it happened, exactly like that, late Wednesday afternoon, when we had to go to the Fort Lauderdale airport. It started pouring down (they call it “flash flooding” here, and you’ll have to become familiar with that term, obviously), and then all of a sudden there was water. the height of the car floor.
OK, good idea, we’re going to turn around.
We ended up finding a hotel by chance and not too far away, with earthworms that had started to crawl across the lobby floor, probably because they didn’t want to drown either.
The guy at the front desk offered a room on the second floor, but just in case, I took a room on the seventh floor. ” Good idea ! » said our hotel guy, probably joking.
The lobby TVs were broadcasting images captured somewhere not too far away. Here, a lady who had her feet in the water, in her own kitchen. There, four guys who looked like they were having fun aboard a yellow inflatable kayak in the middle of the street, a sign of prior preparation. We also saw images of submerged cars, with the roof barely sticking out of the water.
Thursday morning, all this had passed, like a bad dream, and it was explained to me here that we are starting to get used to it, so the drainage operations are usually done quite quickly, but we are still waiting for the fleet for several days, and if there were to be a game five of the Stanley Cup final, one wonders what that would be like. On Wednesday, the Panthers’ charter plane took a good three hours before finally being able to take off for Edmonton. This is perhaps the first time in NHL history that a team was happy to leave for Edmonton.
Advice to the many Quebecers who like to spend half the year here: keep an inflatable kayak in the trunk of the car. It can still be used.