It’s not as hard to get into as you’d expect. Right now** is a great time to get into it. There are a lot of instructors right now trying to build hours waiting for the airlines to hire again. You can find higher quality instructors for cheaper than normal
My instructor works for free. He’s just glad to be getting free flight hours. I wouldn’t recommend doing a formal flight school unless you have money to burn. If you’re good at self-study, get Sporty’s or another online course. Few hundred dollars for the ground school. Then rent a plane to do your hours in
**Huge asterisk here due to gas prices being elevated. It’s not too hard to find cheap 100LL/UL, but that window is closing. As long as the war in Iran is ongoing, higher fuel prices will be a concern. That being said, my Cherokee gets 16-20 MPG equivalent





There’s probably diving in your local area. You’d be surprised, but almost everywhere has at least a few good diving spots. Quarries and lakes are common dive spots
I do a lot of diving in the midwest. Water is cold, but otherwise it’s got some good diving. Ship wrecks are especially cool since cold, fresh water will preserve them for an extremely long time. Once you get drysuit certified, the cold water isn’t much of an issue too
It’s really cool how friendly and curious most life is underwater, and being able to move in 3 dimensions will always be amazing to me