"lightning visit" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe a very short visit, typically one that's not planned in advance, for example: My sister made a lightning visit to see us last week.
I paid a lightning visit to Palo Seco.
A lightning visit calls for a deft impressionist touch.
The plan was outlined by Mr Obama during a lightning visit to Australia, marking the 60th anniversary of a security pact between the two countries.
A lightning visit to Wroclaw by Tim Geithner, America's treasury secretary, to express his alarm over the "catastrophic risk" of cascading sovereign defaults seemed to have little impact.
President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia arrived in rebellious Aceh province today for a lightning visit aimed at soothing tensions but already marred by two small explosions.
It was Miami City Ballet lite when this ever-enterprising company, directed by Edward Villella, made a lightning visit here tonight.
The first time rain and lightning visited the Tournament Players Club at Jasna Polana in Princeton, N.J., yesterday, Gil Morgan had to wait out a delay of 53 minutes, pondering his first big mistake of the Senior PGA Tour's Instinet Classic.
He made clear in his lightning visits to Kabul and to the base in southern France that lost many of the soldiers that he is committed to keeping French troops in Afghanistan, and that it was right to boost their numbers.
For all its large ideas and its high-flown rhetoric, the novel's most substantial character is the hero's pragmatic wife, who turns both the nationalist epic and the great love story upside down when, after years of lightning visits by her husband, she makes it clear just who the true Palestinian hero is.
But in practical terms, in this town he's known for lightning visits that last a few days, during which time he hunkers down at a club to play with dozens of American colleagues, creating manic, comic performances, pleasing audiences with antics that resemble Mr. Hulot after a quart of coffee.
Then, as if the grass-court gods had their own grand plan, lightning visited Justine Henin's racket and remained long enough for her to complete a 2-6, 6-2, 6-2 semifinal victory that was a useful reminder to those who foolishly scripted Capriati's life in the first place.
