Shangri-la

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Bring the gift of knowledge home for the holidays with the 
Eleventh Edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?c11.htm&1
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The Word of the Day for December 7 is:

Shangri-la   \shang-grih-LAH\   noun
   *1 : a remote beautiful imaginary place where life approaches perfection : 
utopia
     2 : a remote usually idyllic hideaway

Example sentence:
     From the air, the city rising out of the mist looked like a Shangri-la, 
but once on the ground we were besieged by the realities of life in the teeming 
third-world capital.

Did you know?
     In James Hilton's 1933 novel _Lost Horizon_, Shangri-La was the name of a 
fictional land of peace and eternal youth in the mountains of Tibet. Hilton 
invented both the place and the name, but over the years people generalized the 
name and applied it to several real or imaginary locations. In 1942, President 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that a secret World War II bombing mission 
had taken off from "Shangri-la" (later revealed to be the aircraft carrier 
U.S.S. _Hornet_). That same year, FDR also used Shangri-la as the name for the 
new presidential retreat in rural Maryland -- a spot now better known as Camp 
David.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.