How Far Away Is The Storm?

As I've mentioned before, I love a good thunderstorm. It's such a nice feeling to be curled up inside, preferably wrapped in your duvet, listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and the thunder rolling around the sky.

I especially love the vibrations of the thunder rolling around and the sense of electricity in the air.

One of the most amazing thunderstorms i ever saw was when we were in Tingri, on the way to Mount Everest Base Camp, in Tibet. Tingri is at 4,300m altitude and so you feel like the storm is literally happening around you, and you really are on top of the world.

(This is a town, although the few houses either side of the one road literally are it!)

We spent hours crouched in the corner by the door of our room that night, with one person on 'rabid dog' watch - a handful of stones to throw at them if they came too near, whilst we took photo after photo, trying to capture the power of the storm. This is my best one, which I'm pretty pleased with.

I was always taught, when I was younger, that to find out how far away the storm was, you had to count the seconds in between the lightening flash, and the start of the thunder growl. This used to reassure me as we had some pretty terrifying storms right on top of us when we camped in France every summer, and I used to get so relieved when the counts would start to increase.

I had a look on the Internet recently, whilst we were in the middle of a pretty electric summer storm here in London, and it said that actually every 5 seconds = one mile. Seeing as that would mean that the storm was much closer than I thought it was, I think I'll stick with my counting!