Hi Charlie - I tried to find a Club close to you, but your right, your up in the boonies. A lot like Wyoming I guess There is an AMA Club Locator tool that Bill Lee created and I am allowed to piggy back some info onto. The Web Link is, [link=http://www.ama-dist-8.org/Clubs/Locator.php]AMA Club Locator[/link]. What is wierd is when I type in Gulliver, MI or zip 49840, I don't get any results even entering the max of 250 miles. Experimenting a little though I found that if I entered Manistique and a radius of 75 miles it came up with 4 AMA Clubs. Now there may be some Non-AMA clubs around there as well but I can't find any, sorry. If you look at the results for the SANDS MODEL AIRPLANE CLUB for instance, you'll see an extra link in the upper right that looks like this - [link=http://Link to GPS and Aerial Photos]Link to GPS and Aerial Photos[/link], this is my info and will give you an aerial view as well as directions and a map option for that particular club as well as some other info.

I hope this helps you find someone to help you get started. I have to agree with the guys that one thing that discourages more new pilots then anything is trying it on their own, crashing and losing a few planes, getting disgusted and quitting. I spent a lot of time flying on the G2 sim before I went out and found a club and a great club member who helped me not only learn to fly, but how to pre-flight my plane and gave plenty of safety pointers along the way. The sim defintely helped a LOT, but it was truly different doing it for real. I can honestly say I would have gone through several planes if I had just gone out and tried it.

My first plane was the Sig LT-40 already mentioned with an OS 46 in it. I did get a pretty good transmitter to start with though, and still use it to fly (JR). I know the trainers aren't as sexy looking as what you've asked about, but I still fly my LT-40 once and awhile just to relax, and have even bought some of those cheap Walmart digital camera's, built a little aluminum bracket, and have made my first attempt at RC aerial photography.

I wish you luck and welcome you to this great sport! You'll be addicted like the rest of us soon

The Edit - Just thought I'd add this as well. If you have high speed internet, you might like this as well. It's called Google Earth if you haven't seen it already. This is a link to a file I keep pretty up to date that shows all of the clubs I've captured the coordinates of their runways during about the last 7 years. I think I have around 1200 Clubs located in here so far, most are in the US, most are AMA, but there are also Non AMA as well as what I call Foreign. If you've used Google Earth before you must already have the program downloaded, if you haven't, it'll take you to the site to download it when you try and click on the bookmarks at the top of the page in BLUE.[link=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/402368/page/]Remote Control (RC) Airplane Clubs & Runways [/link]. The cool thing is it's all free and the best color sat imagery on the web for the public to use. Hope it's helpful.