Taking vacations days in the middle of a semester Context: I am an assistant professor at a small institution in the US.

Question: My significant other has the opportunity through work to travel to an exotic location over a long weekend in February, and I would very much like to join.  That said, it would require that I miss both my Thursday and Friday classes before the weekend.  Would it be unreasonable and/or unprofessional for me to join her on this trip?

I can easily structure my content schedule in such a way that I could cancel these classes without losing anything significant, but I'm concerned about how such an absence would be perceived by my colleagues.  I have an excellent relationship with those in my department, my department chair, and my dean.

I would also be curious to hear how dependent the answer is upon my tenure status.  I am tenure-track and plan to apply for tenure three years from now.
In the departments I have worked in, it would probably be considered unprofessional to leave on a pleasure-cruise in the middle of the semester. I suspect that that is universal. 

In other words, this is not the image you want to project as someone who will still have to go through the tenure process. On the other hand, it's a fairly small thing -- people are gone all the time, although almost always for professional reasons: at conferences, workshops, for collaborations. So the mechanics of being gone are all appreciated in any department, such as moving classes around, giving out reading assignments instead of in-person classes, or putting a midterm exam on such a date and having someone else proctor the exam. Students also understand these things. In the end, it will be a judgment call: It comes over as "frivolous" to leave for a vacation and cancel classes over it, but it's also not a huge deal and I'd be surprised if anyone would think that you'll lose tenure over it. It's just a bad mark in your peers' perception of your professionalism.