I've just returned from a vacation with my partner and a friend to The East where we hoped to eat lobster and be merry.
While we did eat lobster, it was very expensive, and I came to the realization that lobster, no matter where you get it, is generally fairly fresh on account of being horribly boiled alive... so we probably could have just had lobster back home.
The trip was a bit different than our usual affair, and we relied heavily on serendipity -- we'd throw a marker onto the map for the day and just kinda wing the rest. We'd go to restaurants that looked interesting instead of using someone's blog recommendations, then ask people around us what was interesting or delicious nearby.
It was a fantastic and relaxing experience, with low expectations and high payoff.
At one point we discovered a wonderful bookstore that had excellent books as well as a wealth of stationary. I lost myself (and most of my money) for nearly a whole day just browsing and reading, with nowhere else we needed to be.
An interesting find was the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is a book of made-up words to describe very specific emotions that don't already have a word. The author posits that since emotions are difficult to talk about, we haven't made words for many of them even if many of us have similar experiences -- meanwhile we've got half a thousand ways to describe the color green.
I haven't read through the whole book yet, but an emotion hit me when I was sitting in the airport on the way home that I don't believe yet has a word:
The bittersweet feeling when you leave a loved place for what you expect will be the final time.
This could be the last time you look upon an empty apartment before locking the door and moving away, or driving out of a small town on the East Coast where you had a great time for a few days but nothing would likely compel you to ever return; there's just too much else in the world to see and do.
I could use a word for that. It was a nice vacation.