MELBOURNE - Outside, the wind whistles and the rain blows sideways. Towering Australian pines bend and groan. Hurricane Frances has arrived.
Geno Bloom doesn't pay much attention.
He's halfway through his workout inside the Gold's Gym off Highway 192. Metallica blasts from the stereo speakers, and moments later, Van Halen. He presses on, surrounded by posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping iron in tight Spandex shorts.
As Frances approached, Bloom and his wife and daughters fled their condo on the Indian River, leaving behind the Fox News crew parked outside it.
They have gathered inside this gym, of which Bloom is the manager, to ride out the storm with two other families. Fifteen souls, cooped together for a weekend, waiting for whatever may happen on the other side of the wall of glass.
They are young and old, ages 7 to 84. They are Greeks and Italians, New Yorkers from Long Island and Indiana Hoosiers. The refugees include a pregnant woman, a pair of preachers, precocious twin sisters and a parakeet named Tico that enjoys chirping a little too much.
Every hurricane forces worlds to collide, sometimes under one roof. But for all the trouble it causes, it brings gifts, too.
The gift of silence. A chance to slow down. The opportunity to tell stranger how it felt when you fell in love. The fun, reserved only for children, of turning the adult world into a personal playground.
It all happened Saturday among the ab machines and the stair climbers. The world outside rippled with turbulence - trees buckling, waves crashing, rain falling, a whole state wondering what comes next. The world inside made perfect sense in comparison.
* * *
Tony and Salley Hopkins bought the gym nine years ago, mostly with credit cards and a knot in their stomach. They met decades ago in a Target - she was a cashier, he stocked shelves - and married three months later. They have two daughters, 21 and 25, both hunkering down with them in the gym.
They moved to Florida from their native Indiana after a family tragedy.
"Something bad happened," says Tony, 43, and leaves it at that. They needed a new start, he says.
He never had been the religious type, but something began to change in both of them. He and Salley began ministering to prisoners. Eventually he became co-pastor of a nondenominational church in Palm Bay, the Church for All Nations.
He uses the gym in his ministry. He has prayer-request sheets at the front desk and monthly prayer meetings in the gym.
He believes the prayers that have flowed from inside these walls have strengthened as many people as the weight machines have. One man got through prostate cancer. A woman recovered from endometriosis.
So it seemed only right to open his doors and offer shelter to his friends and their families, even to their pets. People needed a sanctuary.
* * *
As a shelter, the gym gets high marks. It has a generator and two locker rooms without windows for when the winds grow scary. A fire station sits next door, and the place has all the workout equipment any hurricane refugee could ever want.
The aerobics room has become a makeshift barracks. Blankets and pillows cover the floor where so many people work on their abs each week. Towels hang from punching bags.
One couple sleeps on an air mattress in the massage room. Someone else has made a bed in the front office. The tanning bed remains vacant but functional, just in case someone gets the itch to tan.
The kids have a remote-control car and a dancing game. The adults have a practice putting green, movies and CDs.
No one here will starve. They have two kinds of jelly, four kinds of chips, five kinds of cookies, cereal, Swiss cake rolls, Twizzlers, moon pies, chocolate candy, peanut butter, water, coffee, Gatorade, honey, English muffins, Fig Newtons, Kool Aid, pretzels, bananas and apples.
"The essentials," says Joe Pellizze, 57, co-pastor with Hopkins at the church.
* * *
The day passes in an ebb and flow of fun and boredom. Tony Hopkins runs the hurdles over a series of punching bags, and everybody votes him an imaginary Olympic medal.
"I'm so bored," she says. "I should have brought my homework. I didn't even think of it."
Instead, she fingers through a US Weekly magazine, reading the latest gossip about Britney Spears.
Bloom's twin girls, Michala and Natasha, spend the afternoon like a pair of blurs streaking through the gym. They're 7. They bounce on the oversized rubber balls usually used for sit-ups. They jump rope. They play hide-and-seek with a 7-year-old boy, Tyler Rogers.
The trio even sprays and cleans every piece of gym equipment - treadmills, stair climbers, benches - for the promise of chocolate pudding and Edy's ice cream.
"The child labor law went out the window," Geno Bloom says, grinning.
His wife, Gina, 32, settles into a case of cabin fever.
"I'm so tired of looking out those windows," she says. She recruits the other women to take a walk outside around the building. They come back minutes later, windblown but refreshed.
Most cases of restlessness - everyone fights them as the hours fall away - pass in time. Michala Bloom has decided she loves life under this roof.
"I want to be here forever," she tells her mom. Maybe it's the ice cream talking.
* * *
With the wind still howling, the rain still pouring and the daylight fading, they gather in a circle and hold hands. All 15 souls, praying with heads bowed.
"Father, we just give you thanks," Tony Hopkins begins, "We're in a safe place. We're together."
There are whispers of amen and yes and hallelujah as he prays.
They sit down to TV dinners and soybeans. They plan to hold a church service in the morning in the day care room.
Darkness falls outside, and the storm rages on. It won't end any time soon.
Inside, the parakeet takes a break from its chirping. For a brief moment, the only sounds are of talking and laughter, and the sound of a young woman's voice filling the empty gym with a hymn.
Pinellas 
