Hello to all FFs!

I have been reading up a lot on these forums about ways to earn miles and status qualifications, and I think I'm going to give it a shot this year. I'm hoping to use this first post as a guide to myself, and hopefully some of you can help me along the way! Perhaps once this year is over I can even be told the secrets of YQ dumping...

In any case, I have memberships with both AA and US, and have actually been Platinum with AA in the not-so-distant past. I actually have 366k lifetime miles with AAdvantage. I live in the DFW area, but travel frequently to California, the Northeast, and England where I have family. I have some other hobbies that require travel and am pretty much open to going anywhere (and hopefully I do!).

To start off this year I have a roughly $700 credit on United that I'm planning to use to go to London at the end of next month. I figure since I'm starting off on *A I'll try and reach elite status with my US Airways membership.

I've loosely been following the rubric found here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...leage-run.html

Although it's somewhat outdated it is definitely a help! I've also found a lot of useful links from here:

http://flyaow.com/classavailability.htm

So... using the ITA matrix I found this:

DFW-IAH-EWR-DUB-LHR on Feb 22nd and LHR-MUC-IAD-IAH-DFW on Mar 7 for $855.70. It's only 11330 miles but it seems like a good deal for the number of segments? Plus I wouldn't mind taking a quick look at some of the European cities. I'd like to turn the trip into a more traditional MR but after looking for some time it didn't seem like it was possible.

As far as booking, do I just call United and give them the booking and fare codes listed? Is this the easiest way to do this?

Thanks for your help everyone... hopefully this post can belong in this forum!