Jaime Gonzalez, of Providence, dries out his rain-drenched clothes on the hood of the car during a break in the rain.

CHARLESTOWN –– After enduring two days of thunder and lightning and torrential rain, campers at Burlingame State Campground spent much of Thursday afternoon drying out.

Throughout the park, campers were repairing torn tents, drying out wet blankets and sleeping bags, and taking an opportunity to enjoy a brief return of an old friend, the sun.

“You see this?” declared Justin Cerbarano, pointing to his screened tent and one nearby that were surrounded by two-inch deep water. “This is nothing. Yesterday, the water was up to my mid-calf.”

Indeed, things had gotten so bad on Wednesday that Cerbarano, a firefighter from Maine, phoned a friend in Cranston to advise him to delay his arrival. At about 3 that afternoon, he gathered up his wife and seven other family members to take them to a relative’s house, where they stayed the night.

He came back to the campsite Thursday, joined by his friends from Cranston, to find his camp site under water. “I asked about getting another site, and they said we couldn’t because they were all booked up.”

Some of the campers who stayed through the deluge — which dumped a record amount of rain across southern Rhode Island — spoke of it as a frightening experience. Patricia and Jaime Gonzalez, who live on Federal Hill in Providence, had checked in Wednesday night along with their six children, ages 1 to 9, and two friends.

They had set up camp at what seemed to be an ideal time. The rain that had driven away Cerbarano and his family earlier in the day appeared to have taken a rest. At one point, they could look up and see the stars and the moon.

But a short time later the rains began anew, and somewhere in the middle of the night everyone in the tent woke to the sound of a tremendous thunder and a lightning bolt hitting close by.

“I got scared because our tent was shaking hard,” said daughter Maria, 9.

The parents recounted how the wind-driven rain tore the tent, soaking everything inside. No one slept. The children said they were so frightened play was out of the question. Jaime Gonzalez spent most of the night trying to hold back the walls, praying that the tent would not fly away.

When they emerged in the morning, the family noticed that the couple who had had a camper nearby were leaving. The wind had ripped away the canopy on top of the camper.

As for Gonzalez, he did what other campers were doing. He buttressed the tent with a tarp.

There were others, though, who seemed to take the experience in stride. Ann Smith, of Sheffield, Mass., along with her 4-year-old daughter Eli, her brother Mike Morelli, of Mount Washington, Mass., and John Bailey, a family friend from Mount Washington, had endured the bad weather for a couple of days, but congratulated themselves on their good fortune when the rain stopped and they were able to start a fire, using artificial logs, under a moonlit sky.

But their good fortune didn’t last either. Awakened by sound of thunder and rain, Smith found herself trying to keep dry as the rain poured into her small tent. Then came the sound of a tree crashing nearby.

Water coursed by the camp site like a river, and was deep enough to cover the stones around the fire pit.

But the men were upbeat. They had bought along a boat, and planned to do some fishing before the weekend was out. They had heard that the rain might stop for at least a couple of days.

Besides, all this was nothing new. “Every time we go camping,” Bailey explained, “it rains. But what’s to complain about? We’re out here in the great outdoors, and we’re not working.”

It was a sentiment embraced by the children at the Gonzalezes’ tent a quarter-mile away, on the other side of huge playing field that had turned into a lake.

rdujardi@projo.com