Choice Privileges - Do you receive a stay credit for an award stay with Choice?

Here's a little background info...I got some Choice points (100k) via the transfer deal that many took advantage of a while back from Amtrak. Problem is that I now have these points and am really having a hard time finding a place to use them at before they expire at the end of the year. (I had tried booking a Preferred Hotel a while back and had hoped to try and do that again this year but I just noticed that the Montage in Laguna Beach, CA is no longer on the Preferred Hotels redemption list! :mad:) Next logical thing would be to transfer them out to Delta under the current promo but I cannot do this since I have never had a Choice hotel stay. I now need to travel to rural VA and my thought is as follows:

1. Redeem 10k points for a free night on my route to VA.
2. Then be able to redeem the 90k for Delta points IF Choice counts the award booking as a stay.

Anyone have experience on if Choice counts an award booking as a stay or if I am out of luck with this brilliant idea of mine? If not I may have to go ahead and make a paid stay and then transfer them out to DL. Oh...If I stay on June 12 will the points and stay credit be applied to my account in time to make the bonus transfer to DL which ends on June 25? If my points don't credit in time for me to take advantage of the DL promo will this activity give me more time before the points expire like with other programs?

When you go to book your stay the web will state if the stay is eligible for Choice credit or not. Only paid stays earn stay credit, so a reward stay should not work. However, I will defer to someone that has tried your approach for a reward redemption for a more definative answer. I do know reward stays do not count towards status qualifications.

Typically stays post within 48 hours, but I've been told by a GM they have 7 days to post them (web pages says to wait 72 hours before requesting missing stay credit) and when they don't make that, Choice asks you to wait up to three weeks.

There use to be a bug in their programs that if you book a reward stay and then cancel it the points are returned to the current bucket. Tried that about a month ago and it didn't happen that way. So I'm looking for ways to burn points expiring this year.