It is true that Availability Groups can make replicas of the active database and can support (depending on version) one or two readable replicas. This does not work with SQL Server 2008 R2 servers. But even if it did, this is not really the vehicle (yes, it is overkill) for getting a couple of databases to test with.
Using the backups that you are already taking to restore a database to another server is the quickest and easiest way to get a database to test against.
Check this discussion for some details on using backup/restore and a useful script to help you:
Automatically restore SQL Server database from file from another server