Ok, so I'm planning my first DONE. It's been pretty exciting (am I sick or what? ) planning this. My #1 goal is to visit Australia. Everything else is secondary. Since IST seems to be one of the cheaper places to start these, I'm figuring on starting there, and breaking this trip up into 4 "trips": Europe, USA, Australia, Asia. The validator has blessed my itinerary, but it's only a measely 45k EQMs on AA and I still have 1 segment left to use either in NAM, Europe or SWP. Here it is:

IST-BCN-HEL (stopovers in both BCN/HEL, my 2 max)
HEL-JFK
LGA-DFW-YVR-JFK (Whistler!!!, 2006 SKI-DO?)
JFK-CUN-JFK (just for the heck of it)
JFK-SYD-BNE

here I take a break and fly home on an award ticket that I can hopefully (please help me out on this) do this with:

BNE-LAX-JFK-(LAX)-AKL
The idea here is to do an open-jaws award ticket out of Australia, stop at LAX on the way home to hang with family and then connect in LAX and go into New Zealand. Next I'll continue my OWE:

AKL-WLG-MEL (stopovers at both WLG and MEL)
MEL-SIN
SIN-HKG-KUL-HKG-BKK (stopovers at SIN, HKG, KUL and BKK)
BKK-LHR-IST

The actual OWE portion of this itinerary comes out to be:

IST-BCN-HEL-JFK,LGA-DFW-YVR-JFK-CUN-JFK-SYD-BNE,AKL-WLG-MEL-SIN-HKG-KUL-HKG-BKK-LHR-IST
and according to the validator is 45,222 miles.

Any comments, suggestions, ideas or anything else is greately appreciated!