A few years back now when I was still relatively new to flying (500 hours or so) I was conducting a fishery protection flight to the south east of the Falklands in an Islander.
On returning towards the Islands I could see some cloud build up on the horizon from about 100 miles out. By 50 miles it was apparent that we had a line of CB's between us and the only land for about 400 miles. The options were fairly straight forward so continue we did, Initially we could see gaps between the clouds. As we got closer the clouds merged and the radar showed the cells so no problem, closer still (10 nm or so) the cells were merging but we could see the rain coming down. By now we were at about 1000ft and aiming for the gap in the rain. As we entered the gap the rain merged and there was lighening forks on both sides. I continued descending to about 500ft and exited the weather with no turbulence at all.
We landed a few minutes later with no unusual turbulance and relieved that it had been so easy. Perhaps we were lucky, it is not something I would make a habit of but I would always opt to approach a CB from low level (below 1000ft) it might be bumpy but any strong downdraughts have to become horizontal at some point.