KILL DEVIL HILLS — The thunderstorm rolled in not long after we returned about noon on Wednesday from shopping at Ben Franklin and the big Kmart.

Wind blew outside, scraping through the screens at the Spouter Inn, a circa 1930s cottage on the oceanfront. Hard rain splashed against a window next to a soft bed where I read and dozed.

I touched the wood where the bottom three panes of glass were sealed. Moisture had seeped through and softened the wood.

That was the fourth day of our visit to the Outer Banks. The storm last Wednesday and another Thursday cracked with lightning and brought winds that shook the old cottage.

I won't go on too much about another vacation — I just spent several days blogging about my family's trip to St. Louis if you care to look it over on reflector.com's family page — but I did want to report a bit on the weather.

Nature can be brutal on the Outer Banks. We enjoy seeing and feeling the power of the storms that pass through. But we also like the clouds to clear long enough so we can play in the waves and on the sand.

We have checked the forecast and the latest radar and satellite images several times a day since we arrived on Saturday. It's helped us plan our activities around the best opportunities for good beach time.

The ability to see where storms are positioned in real time on a computer screen is one of the many ways the Internet informs and entertains us.

Reflector.com's weather page includes a five-day forecast, current conditions and features like the Frizz Factor, which tells humidity by the amount of frizz infecting a lady's hair. You can see it for yourself at www.reflector.com/weather.

I checked the weather on Wednesday for the Kill Devil Hills area and could see that we would be building a sand castle later that afternoon despite the rain keeping us in after our shopping.

We also monitored with interest earlier in the week the path of Tropical Storm Cristobal. We drove through some of its outer bands to get here on Saturday, and fierce cloud formations piled up on the horizon that spread out south of the cottage when we arrived.

We hoped the storm would give us a show on Sunday so we could share our front-row vantage point by posting images and video of it on reflector.com.

But we woke up Sunday morning to sunshine. The 30 to 45 mph winds predicted to blow in from the Atlantic never came.

The satellite images over the next two days showed the storm moving to the east and north, leaving us with little to report other than the rainbow we saw Saturday that stretched for miles over the ocean, a parting tease from Cristobal.

Now, I know we don't need the Internet or even the Weather Channel to tell us whether it's storming. We can just look outside.

But that would not be nearly as much fun.