Congrats also to Aerbabe and tacpot. As people say above, jump into the thing and go visiting. At this stage the £100 cheese sandwich still tastes great. Now is a good time to get used to turning up at an unfamiliar place, joining according to standard practice or local custom, and landing on runways of all sorts of lengths, orientations and degrees of bumpiness, dealing with circuits busy or empty, and ground stations grumpy (rare) or polite (usual).
I would suggest a trip to to France asap. Flying cliche number 947 reads: "the aeroplane doesn't know that it's over water". Plan carefullly, go as high as cloud and airspace permits, and be aware of the "blue-blue" phenomenon even in good VMC. Otherwise, no biggie. Why not make a weekend of it: you could position to (say) Lydd on a Saturday morning, file a flight plan from there, then launch off for the short crossing and go to to Deauville or Amiens as well as or instead of Le Touq. Stay the night, dine in Gallic splendour, then fly back the next day. Whets the appetite for more adventurous trips.
I appreciate that some renters insist on cross channel checks, but my instructors all maintained that a new PPL should have no difficulty in crossing the channel without further training. Why not team up with another newby PPL? I did that with a friend, 3-4 weeks after we got our licences. We did the planning together, then on the way out he flew and I did the nav. We swapped roles on the way back.
After a bit of this sort of thing, you'll probably get an idea of whether you intend to be more into touring, or into going upside down in things with wheels at the back, or a bit of both, and can decide what to rent/what type of gropup to join accordingly. Have fun.
[ 17 January 2002: Message edited by: FNG ]</p>