Is there a full-time job with variety and academic rigor but also 2+ months annual vacation? (don't care if vacation is unpaid) I've had one full time job in my life. It was a teaching job and I got about 2.5 weeks of annual vacation. I had a great time my first year, learned a lot, and I think I improved quite a bit as a teacher. I really liked my students as well.

But going from the second year into the third, I found the meagre amount of annual leave I got to be more and more insufficient. As a student, I had always been able to feel refreshed at the start of each school year because I got a 8 week break in the summer. I'm good at saving money, and so I desperately wanted to be able to choose to take unpaid vacation time without losing my job.

My understanding is that it's easier to get a job with said schedule flexibility at the K-12 level than at the university level. However, I'd rather teach university undergrads. The class I really liked teaching at my old school was the research class where the students had just started developing more advanced critical thinking and academic research skills. 

I know a lot of university professors/lecturers must do a lot of research over all the semester breaks to keep their jobs for the next academic year, and that's not really what I want. 

So I'm wondering if anyone has a uni job (FT, with some kind of health insurance) where you can choose to take a "summer vacation" (or winter one, whatever), and if so, what country you're in and how you got the job...?

I have a M.A. in Media Research/Cultural Studies and I'm getting another M.A. in Linguistics/TESL. 

I'm questioning the received wisdom of "get as high a salary as you can so you can be comfortable when you retire or maybe retire early" because I'm only 30 and my health is already not great, so sometimes I wonder if I'll even make it to 65.

(I know some people will think I'm a lazy, horrible teacher for caring about vacation as much as I do, but I've done that self-flagellation for the previous two years and life is too short for any more of that.)
There are some universities and colleges in the US that require very little research of faculty and stress teaching above all else. In such a place, you have no research commitment, of course, but you probably still need to find the time to develop new courses and gather and create material for them. If, in your field, "taking time off" means things like creating new courses by visiting museums, and such then you can combine work and leisure. But it is rare in education at any level in the US to have no expectations for 2-3 months per year. 

There is more to "teaching" than teaching, even when there is no formal research requirement. But, most places, even those with quite modest reputations do require research and some publication, even if not at the level of R1 universities. 

Think of an academic position as full time. Actually, think of it as 24/7/52. Even when you aren't actively engaged in teaching/creating you need to be thinking about what comes next. Even something as seemingly simple as "keeping up with your field" can be a fairly major undertaking in some disciplines. 

Also, you may have a bit of a misunderstanding. Most academics (other than adjuncts) don't work on yearly contracts. The commitment is usually a bit longer. A person on the tenure track can usually expect a three or four year contract initially with a review at the end of it and a final review in the seventh year. The "annual contract" isn't about continuation, in most places, but about salary and, when necessary, changing expectations. Of course, you can be fired for egregious misbehavior, even with a contract. 



Finally, I'll note that some top universities in the US (Duke, Stanford, ...) have a special category of Teaching Faculty, whose expectations are more in teaching with somewhat lower research expectations. But lower doesn't mean less, it means, in some cases, more pedagogically focused than strict theory of the discipline. 24/7/52.