Like everything else in the States, the rain tends to be "big". Crackin' thunderstorms and large rain drops that have caused my basement to flood in the past (now completely dry due to an injection of mucho dollars, just in case there's a future buyer reading this). American rain however, moves off. If you look at weather maps there, there are large arrows and signs depicting constant movement of weather systems. The rain will be with you for a relatively short time before moving on to a completely different time zone. You then get the weather your neighboring state has just had.
Here, in the UK, the clouds just park themselves don't they? As I write, it has been raining non-stop for 24 hours. Just a bit more than a drizzle, but still. It's rain, and it doesn't look like the clouds are moving at all.
(Ha ha - I took this one from the Met Office web site, to show parked clouds. It came out like this, which I think is so funny, I'm just going to leave it. You can guess which parked cloud you live under!)
My kids are being fairly stoic about the rain given that this is their summer holiday. In fact we had a laff the other day when one of them remarked, Oh Look, The SUN", and then immediately followed up with "Oh, no. It's just a lighter shade of cloud!".
