The weather for the last couple of weeks has been amazing, once the fog clears!
Your first cross country sounds absolutely grand! How lucky you are to have an instructor willing to admit you to the mysteries of finding your way up where there is a distinct shortage of road signs, and no lady on the satnav yapping at you!
Reminds me (here she goes again!) of my first x-country flight with my very first instructor in a glider, a member of the British National Team, Bernie Fitchett, from Booker to Oxford and back again, on a really classic day with thermals, cloudstreets, amazing; we got a bit low over Cowley, and actually were picking fields, but Bernie found lift over the Cowley works, and there we were, circling over the Headington Roundabout, a famous gliding turn point, and back to High Wycombe scarcely needing to turn at all.
It is actually easier to navigate in a glider cross country, just keep on turning to stay in rising air, so have a pretty good idea of where you are coming from as well as where you are going. And that was in the days without GPS; nowadays it is almost too easy. We old crusty pilots think that the first 50 k flight should really only be done in that basic wooden singleseat K8, climbs on a sparrow's fart, doesn't penetrate into wind very well, but on a good day, it only takes 3 or 4 good thermals downwind to make the distance.