Wow...you guys are harsh! When I was in my early 20's (about ten years ago), busting out on weekend trips was a high priority for me! When else are you going to do it? If the girlfiend in Austin is so serious that he's seeing her every four weeks, chances are good she's The One and five years from now he's going to be worried about buying a minivan and some carseats, not taking weekend trips.

So I say...do it now. Fly often! You have limited cash, so you're always going to be looking for deep discount coach fares. For your cities, AA is a good call: you will earn full miles and elite qualifying miles on the cheap-o fares. Out of that market, they will offer competitive fares with Southwest. Ditch Southwest: at your age, my goal was to pile up the miles and get off of this continent once in a while.

At that point in my life, the value of my time was significantly lower. I was still busy, but you can study, work, whatever on a flight. So while I never took pure "mileage runs" like many here do, I would take circuitous routings quite often. I took every VDB that was offered and even got to know which flights had a high probability of needing volunteers for bumps.

Anyway, I know my outlook is different from others. I traveled a lot when I was single, loved every minute of it, and wished I would have traveled even more. My only regret was that I wasn't creative enough: I rarely leveraged partner carriers to get to the most far-flung destinations, instead opting for a lot of Europe, Central America, etc. because I could get there on AA metal. If I only paid closer attention to "the system", I would have been in Asia, more unusual spots in Europe, maybe Africa, etc.