Stay safe, dandarc! Slappy, did your mom stay in Panama City Beach or decide to go north? Best of luck to anyone else in FL as well.
They are nearly to Savannah, some traffic but not nearly as bad as I feared. They plan to get a good night's sleep and head on up to NC tomorrow to stay with friends for a few days, until given the all-clear to return and assess the damage. Looks like their area will be hit hard, so my sister and I are very relieved they got out in time.
We left, event turned out to be much less destructive than was predicted even the morning we left. We don't regret leaving, although I'm really tired from the travel. Cats handled it better than me, I think.
Your parents make it to NC OK? They should probably stay there a good while - Fort Myers was hit pretty hard. Even if they're returning to a not-so-bad situation, there's the problem of obtaining enough gas to actually make the drive.
95 was a shit-show on the return for us - we wound up taking a back-route through SC after it was still ridiculous after getting past I-26 - next time we'll abort the usually faster I-95 route even sooner. Then briefly on 95 in GA - it was still a shit-show, so we then cut diagonally across a lot of south Georgia starting from Savannah on US-84. Usually the expansion to 3 lanes once you're in GA helps a lot, but not yesterday. On US 84, you get to stop every 10-30 miles due to all the small towns and cities, but that's a lot less frustrating than doing the same or more often on the interstate. We stopped in Savannah for a bit - the gas station we parked at for a while was out of gas. We didn't need gas, but would have been a very alarming situation if we did.
And for fun, they're talking about closing I-75 from roughly I-10 to Gainesville due to rising flood waters today, so your parents may need some kind of alternate route to get back anyway. So if they're in NC, I'd suggest staying there as long as their friends will let them.