Longest single vacation was 28 days off in total during a trip to Colombia.
People are answering the poll with the longest vacation they have taken in the last five years, right?
I picked 11-15 days because the university I work for closes before Christmas and reopens after New Years. I’m often off towards the 11 day end of that range.
Other than that I haven’t taken more than a week off at a time.
I don’t like taking vacations, but there’s no way to avoid it.
I typically take three weeks to do an international trip, but for my first trip to Southeast Asia in 2014 I did six weeks.
It helps, of course, that I’m self-employed.
For the past few years, my wife and I take a two week vacation at the beginning of the summer. To do that takes a lot of planning, I work the first half of the year to make sure that my work schedule will allow for it, coordinating with other colleagues’ vacations and my project’s schedule. It’s always a dance to make sure it happens, but it’s important enough to both of us that we protect that time.
Well, it was 7 years ago, not 5, but I took one week off to move, and then I took another week (that included a July 4 holiday) to recover from moving.
However, I once took a 3-week vacation, and I recommend them highly. It took me the whole first week just to deprogram and relax into my vacation. Which was backpacking. Yeah I was happy to get back to work to recover from my vacation. Those were the days!
For me the longest was 30 days, on two separate occasions.
The first time (road trip in Mexico), I had to ask for unpaid leave, as I’d not earned enough vacation days at that point. The last time (rental-RV road trip in New Zealand), I had plenty of vacation days, plus a bonus 10 days for “R&R” due to being assigned to a third-world country.
Both times, I was working for the same company I work at today. Luckily we have a great work culture where vacations are encouraged rather than frowned upon. There’s also no real pressure to remain in contact while you’re on vacation, unless you’re running a major project and don’t trust your engineers, or you’re running a major project and trust your engineers too much (i.e., need to prove you are needed).
In general, I like to take one long vacation (two weeks or longer) so that I can spend real time in a place (especially if it’s a 12 hour or more plane ride), supplemented by various long weekends for Michigan/Ontario activities.
Foreigners working in the US don’t count, and Americans working abroad do?
goes off to remove Ravenman’s eye from her finger, clean and return it
I agree that vacations are important. My last job, they made a big deal of how many vacation days they offered, but then got pissy when people tried to take them.
I missed the “In the last 5 years” so my vote for greater than 30 days is invalid. In my late 20’s and early 30’s I took a 6 week and 7 week vacations to go trekking in Nepal and New Zealand. But in the past five years my longest vacation is 16 days, done a few times.
14 work days off 2 years ago for a trip to Asia. I did a trip to the UK last year but only 11 days. I’ve taken longer vacations, but not in the last 5 years.
In the 22 years I worked full-time I never had a single vacation day. I had jobs where I could ask for a day or two off, but they weren’t paid vacation days. I worked labor 6 years, retail 5+ years, and as a special ed. aid in the school system for about nine years.
Can you clarify what I asked about? You mention “total duration of** the trip**” but do you actually mean the total vacation? If I take a week off (total nine days) and travel for four of them, you want me to report nine, right? Or if I stay home the whole time, does that count?
Yep, that seems to be what he’s after.
I once worked a job that had about a month or two off every year. The pay was lousy, and I only got two weeks of paid vacation, but damn do I miss having July and August off every year. And I always saved enough that the meager unemployment benefits carried me just fine through the downtime.
Well, okay, the first time was a trip abroad from the USA (where I was working) to Mexico and back, and the second time I was working for my American company making American dollars… okay, the second one is iffy.
If we’re including weekends, I need to change my answer from 10 days to 16 days, with weekends. Not that there was any trip involved, but I stayed home and bushhogged my pastures and read all day, if I wanted.
I almost never go anywhere. Too many animals.
StG
:smack: Thanks!
I have an unusual work schedule, which means that I can take longer vacations using fewer actual days off. Combined with holiday-dense times of year, that means I generally can take two 17-day vacations a year and still have a day or two off to extend a long weekend or fill in a gap like the Monday before the 4th of July this year.
I’d take more if I had the time available; I genuinely feel sorry for folks whose employment circumstances don’t allow them to take adequate vacation; I doubt that’s good for them or their companies.