Another point on the time issue: I used to work with a lot of foreign workers. Many of them would go back to India or China for extended periods of time, how they would make it work is to basically use two years worth of vacation up at once over the December-January timeframe: all of the previous year's vacation in December and all of the next years vacation in January. If you're lucky enough to have the week of holiday time off as well, you could easily stack five to seven weeks of contiguous time together depending on your allocated leave.
Doesn't help much if you want to bike tour in Montana, you've gotta go somewhere where the weather cooperates, and you lose two years vacation in one go, but for a month and a half to two month trip, not a bad way of doing it.