Good day to all – first post after a very long time lurking, and enjoying many of the threads related to BA

My air travels over the years with BA have been modest, occasionally made silver, but now despite fairly regular travel in Europe I don’t enjoy much in the way of status, although I did make Bronze a couple of years ago by sheer volume of flights as opposed to passing the TP threshold.

Anyway as a result of my travel and my wife’s Tesco loyalty I have 91,000 Avios and she has 81,000. We are planning a 2.5 week holiday in California in September 2016, walking around Yosemite for the first week or so, and then visiting the area between Los Angeles and San Diego. We were intending to travel at least WTP both legs and maybe try for Club World on the return

We’ve looked at the various redemption threads, and then searched BA, we found that getting outbound flights isn’t too bad, but virtually no availability for the inbound. Much as we love California it’s not an option to stay there indefinitely!

So we wondered if we could tap into the collective expertise of this board for the most cost effective way of doing the trip. Outbound would ideally be from LHR soon after the first weekend in September (avoiding Labor Day), to SFO, or to LAX then internal flight to Fresno. We plan to drive whilst in the US including from Yosemite to San Diego, eventually departing San Diego or Los Angeles about 2.5 weeks after landing

We’d be quite open to ‘innovative’ solutions, e.g. involving other internal flights, or ex-EU if it gets us the class of travel we want, or makes best use of the Avios.

Any thoughts, ideas, strategies gratefully received.