For my first flights I'll go to a club and seek help but I live in the middle of nowhere on Virginia's eastern shore and the closest clubs I could find were over the bridge in Hampton Roads & Virginia Beach (2 hours away). You also mentioned possibly upgrading to floats later on which would be very nice as there are numerous calm estuaries of Bay around me that I could take-off & land from. Is the flat bottom wing better for water take-off/landing on sponsons? That would be a good justification for a flat wing trainer that I could upgrade to a water plane later on.

The good news is I have 1000's of acres of open land to fly over (very attractive compared to my buddies who I'd watch fly north of Boston out of a parking lot every Saturday. One had to get the superintendent of the local mall to let him on the roof to recover his crashed plane). Unless I can find some other local people, I'll be flying by myself after some brief instruction but my guess is they are out here... I just can't find them. They'll hear the buzzing and find me once I start flying.