American Express Membership Rewards - Best option for Economy travel from US to Europe on MR points

Hello, I hope someone can help me as I've been searching on this for awhile. I have 83000 MR points available and 69000 American Air points.
My wife and I would like to travel from Raleigh, NC( RDU Airport) to England (or anywhere west Europe) probably through London Heathrow. We can travel from August 10th for up to 2 weeks till the end of August.

What is the cheapest way to get from Raleigh to Europe right now (Economy)? I've heard that Virgin and Aeroplan are sometimes the best ways to get to Europe by transferring miles. If necessary, we can settle for taking 2 flights (one on AA and one using AE MR points). I also know that AE will let us borrow 15000 or so more points bringing us to 100000 MR in time for the trip if that makes a difference.

Any experts out there that can help us plan our trip? We're trying to use as little cash as possible (using points to ofset costs). Thanks in advance!

Just some thoughts for what they're worth, since I'm also planning a trip from the southeastern US to LHR...

* Virgin's offering some great fares right now, about $600 rtrip, but realize that fare is from ORD, JFK, etc and doesn't include your fare to the gateway city. You could use AA miles to book your flight to, say, JFK, claim your bags, then check in at VS for your flight to LHR (AA likely won't inline your bags to Virgin, but then, maybe there's a special agreement I don't know about - anyone?)

One advantage of VS is that you can book one leg of your trip with points and pay for one, on either ticket - you can also book one leg in Economy and one in Premium Economy. You can transfer MR to VS 1:1 and the going rate usually isn't awful - I booked a fare JFK-LHR for a friend using about 40,000 points + $300 in fees last fall and the return trip was in Premium Economy. She said it was great.

* You can also transfer MR points 1:1 to DL/NWA, which is running quite a few options right now. I'd actually look into this, since they're going to want to fly you out of ATL - not a bad jaunt at all from RDU, and one you might even be willing to pay for, since it's what, only about an hour in the air?

I just priced out a ticket and one option was 70K roundtrip BNA-LHR, so you'd have enough miles to get at least one ticket free, most likely.

Unfortunately there's not a great way to move points from AA to either Virgin or DL/NWA without massive devaluations, like 5:1. But you could definitely mix and match using your AA miles to get to your gateway city, which would pare at least a couple hundred bucks off your fare, then use your MR to score a free ticket from gateway to LHR for one of you. Good luck!

1st option will be redeeming 2 one-way AA flights from RDU to Europe or the other way. It seems AA's direct RDU-LHR has great availability throughout August. Then you're spending 60k AA miles. And then use MR points for the other one-way trip. SQ offers one-way redemption but only for its own FRA-JFK (20k per person). AF offers one-way award for only AF/KLM flights (25k per person) and transferable from MR, but they used to charge massive surcharges and you need to drag yourself from-or-to gateway cities.

Or, ANA's total-7000-to-9000-mile trip is 43k, so you can book 2 of it with 86k MR points by pulling 3k points in advance. I think your roundtrip journey from RDU to western Europe can be fit in 9000 miles. You can check in star alliance round the world mileage calculator tool. It seems grabbing award flight is very hard with star alliance at this point but you can try.
Edit: Seems AC has some availability through YYZ. Also ANA award allows many stopovers (3 or 4) although one may suffer from mileage limit in the end, anyway you can have some creative trip.

Hope this helps.

^ Great ideas, there. Also, VS will let you book one way LHR-ATL for around 12,500 miles apiece - although the downside is a $500 or so ticketing surcharge for two tix. But still, you'd have enough points left over to get ATL-RDU easily, using a 1:1 transfer MR>DL.

Good luck!