weather can be worse than the forecast

i've been trying to get a short cross country flight for JYO-CHO (Leesburg, Va to Charlottesville, Va) in for a few days but the weather has not been cooperative. the interesting thing today is that the METARs and TAFs (weather observation and forecast info) do not appear bad but it looks much worse outside the window. the winds aloft are even worse according to another student at my flight school. if i were relying only on the weather forecast info i might have considered planning a flight but based on the mark one eyeball and outside the window combination i'm going to wait another couple of days. friday looks like my next chance. the flight plan i did last night was also to practice some VOR navigation so i'm going:

• JYO->LDN (Linden VOR)
• LDN->CSN (Casanova VOR)
• CSN->CHO (Charlottesville)

i put several checkpoints in the nav log for crossing a railroad, abeam a small town and so on.
for the return i'm going to do it a little differently:

• CHO->CDN
• LDN->JYO

i'm planning on using VOR radials for my navigation but also doing flight plans in the GPS just to be safe.

if you're interested in what things like "winds aloft" look like, here is an example of the current ones for my area (you can find it at: http://aviationweather.gov/products/nws/winds/?area=boston&fint=06&lvl=lo ) :

FT  3000    6000
EMI 3324 2844+06
RIC 2824 2841+11

what the above says is that weather station EMI (Westminster) is observing winds from 330 at 24
knots at 3,000 feet and from 280 at 44 knots at 6,000 feet, +6 Celsius (the range i typically fly in).
RIC (Richmond) has winds from 280 at 24 knots at 3,000 feet and 280 at 41 knots at 6,000 feet, +11 Celsius.

you can find weather info at: http://adds.aviationweather.gov/metars/
enter 'kiad kjyo kokv kmrb' in the text box for airports to check and hit 'submit' with either 'raw' or 'translated' checked. the airport identifiers above are: Dulles, Leesburg, Winchester and Martinsburg. there's a lot of into contained in the output from that and it's interesting to compare the raw and translated output.