If there's one thing that the Alps do well it's thunder and lightning. As a big noise fan, I generally delight in the ear-splitting, crockery-rattling great peals of thunder like some monstrous carronade barrage rolling down the valley. And you get used to the outages; all power cables are above ground here, so one banks on losing power for a few minutes during a corker.
Sunday's storm was particularly spectacular - fierce, prolonged and right overhead. A lightning strike on the road about 150m away tore a 1m hole in the bitmac, a 3m trench to a pine tree and blasted off all the bark from one side but without a single scorch mark. We lost power three times, at worst for two hours. But hey. We have oil lamps.
The internet was not quite so robust. The problem with running blistering fast interweb over 4G mobile networks is vulnerability - and after gamely surviving the worst of the storm on Sunday, the internet died at about midnight and only came back yesterday evening. Two days without the internet showed just how dependent I am on it. Which is possibly a good reason to lose it from time to time.
