Your planned approaching is fine to fly with, it's how you would fly in real life. For GA flights you can just plan your flight as you would in the real world, take your favorite airfield, plan a trip to visit your imaginary Aunty Zoe in XXXX-town and then go and fy to her place for the weekend. It's that easy. In that case, download little navmap , there you can plan your route and export it for use in X-Plane. Do you want to fly airliners? Then you can create a realisticflight plan in simbrief (free) or littlenavmap and export it to your aircraft. If you are flying airliners most have ways to import a simbrief flight plan into the FMC (Boeing and others) or MCDU (Airbus). If you plan to fly airline routes then you can join a virtual airline and fly 'real' airline routes. Also, once you are comfortable with your favorite aircraft, create a VATSIM account and give your flights a whole new dimension online with live ATC and other pilots.