Paul let me congratulate you. You are the kind of student that those of us on the frontline of flight instruction can only just dream about and thats a fact. You have done your research and are doing a reasoned approach to everything.

On the Sim do not worry too much as you already know it is not quite the same and in real life finding the runway is not quite as bad as the sim.

Do not get me wrong they are a noticible help and a wonderful adjunct to training an what I normally recomend is to use them concurently with your flight training and not to fly the sim for long periods before starting training with an expectation of reaching some goal beforehand.

Keep it up and I expect to see a lot more postings from you as you keep climbing each rung of that ladder to realize the dream.

John