Memories from a stormy night
Some of the best stories begin with long time ago. I have a lot of those. Different stages in my life I guess. One that comes to mind today is the strangest place I ever slept. It came about during a cycling trip to a set group of small islands just north of here. A windy place. Given two moments of very bad weather. And one of the evenings the combination of rain and wind an electrical activity left my partner and I seeking shelter. Real shelter, better than that of his pup tent. In a nearby marsh there was a small concrete building. About the size of a small home with a fortified door and a missing window. We made our own choice and climbed inside. Out of the rain and the wind and everything else. To sleep on a hard floor was no big deal and we knew this building was not going to blow away. As it turned out the building was the antenna centre for a loran system I’m not going to go into a technical explanation but I wish I had photos. Inside even while disaffected the place looked like a set from a Frankenstein movie. Lots of big switches and ways to let the electricity go to ground. What you want during a big electrical storm. And so without any more thought to the situation we simply spread out our sleeping bags and went to bed. In the morning weather had softened and so we climbed back out through the same window and looked at the nondescript shelter we had used for the night I knew little of what the building had actually been used for but there was no longer any worry. This was fully retired. Simply too expensive to remove all the electrical infrastructure. Including a huge antenna off in the field. I am not sure if the building still exists decades later. I should go on Google and ask the right questions. But it provided me with a dry night with little danger of electrocution and it gave me something to think about years later. The best kind of a once upon a time story.
