Meh Hee Co

Friday was my first time getting a sweet trip. We had 5 legs from CGI-GSP-IAH-MMSP-LRD-ADS for a total of 8.2 hours flying and over 2,300 miles flown. I loved every mile of it. The first two legs were spent dodging T-Storms, pretty fun. The third leg was the most fun and a good learning experience. It started in IAH just before sunset. I got our flight plan from dispatch and headed out to the plane to go grab our clearance. Little did I know that the flight plan filed and our clearance were going to be completely different. Aside from the destination and one VOR, the entire route was different than what I was expecting. So here comes the brand new FO in me. I completely screwed up copying down our clearance and sounded like a private student on the radio. The controller read off the routing at warp speed, naming the fixes waaay faster than my hand could write. So I did my best to read it back, but it was a mess. After 2 screwed up readbacks, I just asked for phonetics. I should have just done that in the first place. After the third time reading back the clearance, a very annoyed controller said "Ameristar 184, read back correct" Phew....I was embarrassed. I thought I was prepared. I had the flight plan in my hand, had reviewed the filed departure procedure and routing on my maps, just wasn't prepared for the curveball that clearance was going to throw my way. Next time I'll prepare harder for unexpected routing. (P.S. All that work was for nothing......after our first fix we were cleared direct to our destination. There were 6 fixes we skipped when we got cleared direct.)
Anyways, back to the fun part of the trip. We took off right before sunset. There was a large T-Storm about 40 mi west of Houston that the sun was setting behind. It was a pretty sight to see. Hopefully sometime soon I'll get a decent digital camera so I can share with you some of what I'm seeing. But the best visuals were to come. As we were flying over the Gulf of Mexico on our way down to our destination, there were T-Storms in front and to the west of us. We were treated to a spectacular light show from the night sky being illuminated by the lightning. This was my first time seeing storms from the front of a cockpit up in the flight levels. Awesome. Thankfully none of the storms were in our flight path.
Listening to Mexican nationals speaking Spanish on the radio is quite interesting. I need to brush up on my Spanish. I could sometimes catch what they were talking about, but most times I'd just catch numbers and VOR's. The controllers that we were talking to were easy to understand and had excellent English. At first I was a bit skeptical on the quality of the controllers English from stories I have heard, but everything went smooth.
We arrived at our destination and I must say, it was nothing too spectacular. I didn't anything besides the airport, a customs agent, a few fuelers and a ground handler. Typical. About the only difference between airports in the states is that all signs in the airport are in Spanish. I didn't get the chance to see any of the country while we were flying over because it was dark. Next time.