My first solo cross country was from Atlanta to Talladega, Alabama and I worked out the entire trip on paper (namely VFR charts, planning worksheets, and MS notepad) before going. It was a tremendous learning tool to armchair fly the entire flight in my mind, changing frequencies, asking questions to myself, making radio calls, flipping maps, envisioning the flight as it unravels, fueling the plane, adding oil, and running checklists.

If you want life to be easy on your first cross country fly the entire flight end to end, even if it takes hours to do so. You will be amazed how many bugaboos you need to iron out doing this. When you finally get to the real airplane on the solo day you will be doing what you went through in your mind in your armchair. You will be more peaceful and you will learn more too.

Flight instructors only let students do a solo cross country they know can do, in other words they know the student has had all the training they need by then and shown at least a basic understanding of everything they were taught. But what they do not know, is how much of what the student was taught he or she will actually apply when the instructor is missing and not available. The student becomes the teacher then, and learns to think as a pilot. That is the point of the solo cross country. The power to learn is actually given to the student by the student.

Good luck. Have fun with it.