Charles, please don’t take the wrong perspective from our posts. Its not true to say there is no safe way to fly xc and that whatever you do carries a high chance of damage to yourself and-or your ship. That is simply not true.

If you do as recommended in learning to land your ship very efficiently, minimum and exact speed control, (your PW can land as short as our 1-26’s, Ive seen it done at the 1-26 Championship/Low Performance contest last year),AND pick routes which have a generous supply of open fields, you can very safely do lots of xc. You don’t need big wings and super high performance ships. In fact, a very good argument can be made that the small, slower speed ships are easier and safer to fly xc given that the availability of landable fields for us is much greater than the 18-20 meter ships.

As for an area where you can climb high enough to go from airport to airport, thats a pretty tall order for a low performance ship. The area you fly around central georgia is very landout-field friendly. You can easily work out a few courses starting with google earth, picking potential landout fields spaced if you like every 10 or even down to 5 mile spacing. Then take a weekend drive and check them out from the ground or get a power plane buddy and fly the route checking them out. Easy piesy, absolutely safe.

If you want to go somewhere to fly xc with an abundance of humongous landable fields, Sunflower aerodrome in KS would be a fine place, or Lawrenceburg IL.

I think you simply need to do a little homework finding out how far you can fly given 2,000 ft of altitude, plan a few simple triangles, practice your short field/spot landing skills, then go for it. You can over think this thing to the point where you end up too frightened to ever go anywhere. Many of us have had first xc/landout jitters but went, did a flight, maybe landed out successfully. And afterwards realized it not such a big scary deal after all.
Dan