My father loves tragedies; his favorite Shakespeare is King Lear and his favorite Greek play is Medea ... fortunately he is and has always been in all ways an excellent father with no apparent murderous tendencies so it's a good thing that symbolism in life doesn't work the same way as it does in art.

in re: road trips and the weather, I think often of the part in Sherwood Smith's Wren's Quest where Wren and Connor lovingly channel all their Realistic Road Trip Problems into their co-written play and are told at the end that it is in fact too realistic and there's far too much dull business with weather. (that said, Ren Hutchings' forthcoming The Legend Liminal is a road trip book with no weather in it due to the premise of being trapped on a highway outside of time, space, and real-world weather forces.)