If you spend a lot of time outdoors in Florida you will occasionally get caught in the rain. This is not always a bad thing - so long as there is no lightning, you can enjoy sights and sounds of the river that only occur when it rains.

For one thing, rainstorms are different. Sometimes you get wind and waves and the rain stings as it is driven into your face, and sometimes the rain just falls straight down in big, sloppy drops.

These are the best rains to get caught in. You get to see the patterns of raindrops on the smooth surface of the river and see the little bubbles of air they create swirling off with the current. The sound is beautiful, too - you hear varied "plunks" of different sized raindrops striking the water, and then the soft "pop!" of the air bubbles rising up and bursting.

Sometimes you can see the rain approaching from a long ways off.

One day we were going across Little Sawgrass in a gentle rain and were serenaded by frogs. Little Sawgrass is very grassy, and as the rain fell thousands of frogs came up to the surface of the grass and raised their noses to the sky to croak a happy chorus of "ribbits" and "croaks". It was a fantastic sight and sound!

The rain moves across the marsh towards the old lightning-blasted cypress tree.

Sometimes you even get to see a rainbow!

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