Good point - I'm outside of burlington, vermont. Great ice cream (home of ben and jerry's...my nephew used to baby sit for them!), but lousy air fares. Close enough to manchester, NH to take advantage of southwest if the fare is low enough to make a 3 hour trip worthwhile.

The good thing about amex is (I guess) that I can hold the miles there until I need them and transfer them to a variety of FF programs - in this case, they do southwest, jet blue (hooray! jetblue flies out of burlington), delta (hard to get seats from what I hear), and continental. Didn't really check to see if any of the other programs they support (like BA) can then indirectly transer via an alliance to an airlines like alaskan, since (as you observe) that would be an obvious choice.

I am going to try applying for some cards in my wife's name too...waiting for her to get some targeted offer with high miles (like 30K or more). If she never gets any I can always try the standard offers that pop up every so often for 25K miles.

I can feel an addiction coming on...the need to use my mileage cards to buy gift cards to pay for things via portals and such.