Houma to Lake Charles

After a full week of being too busy to fly I got back in the air today. It wasn't easy though. I worked out a flight plan from Houma to Galviston, Texas, but when I loaded up the sim with real-world weather and requested permission to taxi to the runway for takeoff, the tower denied the request!

That's not happened before, but the clouds were down to 600 feet, visibility was less than 2 miles, and IFR (instrument flight rules) were in effect. I'm not instrument rated and did not file an IFR flight plan, so I was grounded. Fortunately in the sim you can just click the weather option on the menu and change the weather to whatever you want. After exercising that god-like power, I was granted clearance and took off. Here I am climbing out over the city of Houma, Louisiana. You can just barely see the airport behind me to my right (left side of image):

I got lined up on my VOR's and headed west with the Gulf of Mexico off to my left. After a while, I looked over and noticed an oil rig off in the distance. I had looked for those on my last flight without finding one, so I had to check it out:
In the image above, I'm about 500 feet over the water, about to buzz the rig. My actual flyby (see below), probably dipped to about 300 feet and pretty close to the rig itself. Pretty neat:
Here's another shot, exterior view, of my flyby. Notice my shadow on the water:Anyway, that detour cost me a good half-hour, so before I could even get to the Texas border my allotted flying time for the day was running out and I was getting tired. I did notice one more oil rig off the coast about that time, but decided not to go any further for the day but to divert to Lake Charles Regional airport which is in western Louisiana. The airport was about 25 miles north of my flight path, so it only took me 10-15 minutes to get there and land:
The landing itself was pretty good, although right at the end I floated a bit (stopped descending while only 10-20 feet off the ground), and when I started dropping again my descent rate got a little faster than I'd prefer. No damage to the airplane, but not my smoothest touch-down.

Tomorrow I'm going to either continue to Galveston, or maybe just go straight to Houston from here. Either way it's about an hour flight.