Thanks, Huckster!
I will take your advice about getting my tailwheel endorsement into serious consideration. When the opportunity avails itself, I will probably take it now.
I actually recently bought a C162 w/low hours and love it. Can't beat about $20/hour for fuel!
Definitely have some trips planned this year!
And yes sir, I have no intention of being scared by less than perfect days. I'm currently working on getting comfortable with moderate Xw landings. The C162 is light as a feather so it's really a challenge for me to land it right now in anything more than 7 knot or so direct crosswind. But now that I'm focused on improving my Xw landing skills, I aim to get up to being able to comfortably land it at the 12 knot demonstrated max crosswind pretty soon. I'll probably upgrade to a much heavier airplane in a year or so, at which point is 12 knot crosswind will be much less significant, but I still intend to polish my Xw landing skills while I own this feather of an airplane. It's so unnerving to be uncoordinated and not flying wings level when coming in to the land. Just starting to get used to that feeling now as I've found I can only get away with about a 3 knot Xw in this little C162 with no crosswind correction. Any more than that and the landings get hairy without proper Xw correction technique.