Ah, but two years ago Continental had award tickets to Japan for only 25,000 miles apiece as a special award and just this last year they had award tickets to Frankfurt for only 25,000 miles each as well.

More use of your miles might be to make use of DealWatch on WebFlyer. There's a link to mile deals and they highlight the weekely offers of Continental and other airlines who have weekend awards for as few as 10,000 miles. This could pove to make fun getaways better for you sonce United doesn't offer this feature yet.

Here's the link:
http://www.webflyer.com/deals/dealwa...arch_miles.php

And again - welcome to FlyerTalk.