<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">And one final thing... when they say no seats for 50K miles, only EasyPass... any tricks for getting the 50K award anyway? </font>
Two suggestions:
1) Check flight availability on
http://usr.v7.com/wpaa/ or
http://www.nwa.com
2) Look for non-standard routings. Just because there is no availability on SFO-EWR-AMS-FCO, doesn't mean you can't route an award ticket through SFO-IAH-MIA-AMS-FCO or SFO-MSP-ORD-AMS-FCO. Look for availability from all of KLM's US gateways and then find the appropriate US connecting flights on CO, NW, or even AS.