Flight following is an excellent help for a student pilot. Just remember to tell the controllers that you are a student, especially if you are nervous.

I also have my students draw the runway(s) at the airport on their nav log. Then I'll have them draw a line representing the direction they will be traveling when they arrive. Now if you are a track up guy or gal, you can turn the paper around and you'll see the relative layout for your destination. That helps a lot at the small, uncontrolled fields we fly to.

I do this sometimes still. Gives me great SA going into new airports.

USMCFLYR

As many others have said, use flight following. They also are handy for telling you about other planes around you that you DONT see. Best advice I can say is be confident the next time you go out. Everyone makes mistakes. learn from them, that way you wont do something really bad like fly into a hot restriced area or soemthing else. You messed up, you are alive, and dont do it again. I have said that to myself I dont know how many times, and honestly sometimes still do. Ok, probably more than sometiems.

It might help to get flight following so approach/center can help if you have any problems

Lots of good tips so far, and good stories... The easiest way to do it all VFR is to constantly check your position and set boundaries for your flight.

I start my typical ground lesson on navigation like this:
"If you navigate effectively, you won't get lost. If you navigate proficiently, you'll know where you are at all times."
So in essence, draw that line on your chart and do your best to look outside the aircraft and make sure you are as perfectly on that line as possible. Even small objects such as quarries and football stadiums can help precisely orient you.

As for boundaries, pretend you are giving yourself directions. For instance, "I'm going keep XXX interstate on my left, XX river on the right, and If I get to XXX lake I've gone too far. "

Good luck on your next X/C. I'm sure you'll do fine!

Boundaries are an excellent idea, in the Marines we called them "Catching features" when we were doing our land navigation. I use the same techniques for the air. (eg "If I keep road to my right and treeline to my left, I maintain heading. If I cross the river I've gone too far.) As was mentioned before Flight Following is great. I'll call in once in a while to verfiy a checkpoint that I am passing over, especially if certian areas start to look identical. As someone else said on here, admitting you are lost will definitely save you by reorienting you, and possibly keeping you from doing somehting worse, like violating airspace (especially the ADIZ!!).

Oh my - everything seems to change! I thought we called them "limiting features"

Flight following if available is great! I always used it on my cross countries and still do.

USMCFLYR

hahaha, you know that changing the term from "limiting" to "catching" features got someone a promotion. Must've involved several death-by-powerpoint productions and a year long analysis costing a lot of Marine Corps funds. You know how it goes though, everytime terminology changes a General gets a star!

Well, it is helpful to ATC to report it sooner rather than later but of course don't let them rush you...be damn sure you have the field (the correct one) in sight before you call it.

But if you don't call it, you might suddenly get cleared for an instrument approach that you hadn't briefed and are now responsible for stepdowns, PT's, etc.

There's another frequent poster who probably hates to have this thread revived too!