I have a confession to make. I had enough vacation leave to take off today but decided to work this morning so I could get one final ride and top 5,000 miles bike commuting for the year. Our on-line time system was down over the weekend, so I didn't realize that I had enough vacation left to take off an entire extra day until I checked our records yesterday. Since I was so close to reaching my 5K goal for the year, I decided to just come into work for the morning.
I really messed up my vacation planning this year and ended up taking off 3 weeks in November and December, with cold and lousy weather much of that time. One of my goals for 2014 will be to plan some bike trips and make better use of my leave. What threw me off this year is that my employer gave us an extra week of leave in lieu of pay, plus I passed the 15-year mark, which gave me another week -- so I had two extra weeks of vacation but didn't take off enough time while the weather was still nice. Despite that, I topped 9,000 total miles cycling for the first time even though I didn't take a bike tour for the first time in a number of years. I won't let that happen next year and already have at least two trips planned.