On Sunday, May 31, 2020 at 7:10:21 AM UTC-7, wrote:
Charles,

The Soaring Club of Houston has an incredible cross-country soaring program. We begin with the A, B, C and Bronze badges using both classroom and glider sessions. Each Saturday morning, we begin with a group class followed by flying. At the end of the day, we review IGC files using SeeYou on the big-screen tv for all to compare and learn from. From January through March, we have much more time for class and the soaring days are typically short. By this time of year, most will have passed their C or Bronze and are attempting their Silver badge. We require the Silver badge before you can race with us but once you have it, the days are similarly organized with daily weather briefings, task calls and racing in both FAI and Sports categories. We're lucky to have fantastic coaching and a highly-engaged group of cross-country race pilots who are willing to share everything they know to make you better. Each race day typically ends with a patio debriefing with a cold beverage followed by grilling and a community dinner.

Houston has good soaring year-round but it's best from July through September. The surrounding area is relatively flat with many nearby airports, open fields and nice people. The club is quite large with a fully-furnished clubhouse, 3 Pawnees, members can own hangars on the field and we even have an RV campground with full hookups on the 90 acres of land we own. This is a fantastic place to learn to fly cross-country! We also have two PW-5s who race with us every week and they fly competitively in the tasks we call so you would be very comfortable in this crowd.

We're hosting the Sports Class Nationals the first week of August, come on out and visit us this Summer, you'll be glad you did!

Chuck Werninger
LS-4 VL
Soaring Club of Houston

I will echo what Chuck said.

I'm a fellow PW-5 owner. I earned my Silver Badge in it a little over a week ago. I also have 4 landouts to my name as I've been flying it cross country: the first in a cow pasture, one at a strip that could be a dirt runway, the other 2 were at an airport. The first two required disassembly, the last two I got aero-retrieved.

I would totally recommend going through the ABC Bronze program and starting the cross country flying. The hardest thing will be peeling off from the home field. Yes, your Oudie will show you the landout spots in your database, but you should also configure your Mc & Alt and use something like McCready 3 to 5 depending on where you fly, and maybe even use bugs percentage as well and add more cushion for your altitude calculations. Using those will give you a pretty good picture of where you can reach safely. You just might be able to safely reach an airport where you can get aero retrieved and buy the tow pilot a beer vs. landing in pasture and have a half dozen of your closest friends come retrieve you with your trailer and dealing with disassembly and assembly of the glider + buying a good steak dinner for your half dozen closest friends. Better get used to it in the PW-5 by the way...

The nice thing about PW-5 is that it's a small glider, highly responsive and you can land almost anywhere since you have a small wing.

Enjoy it!!

Rob