On my way home from Palermo to San Francisco, I’ve had to change planes a couple of times, and am overnighting at Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) near Paris.

Travel is nice, but coming home is even better! I am looking forward very much to seeing Phyllis and the kids.

At CDG, I am staying at the Sheraton. This hotel is really a fun place to stay, and is an integral part of the airport, you walk here from the arrivals and to the departures area without going outdoors, and it is surrounded by runways and airport access roads. The sound proofing is perfect, and I can’t hear a whisper from all the activity out my windows.

The design of the hotel is shaped like a ship with a prow, or (more aptly) an airplane. The internal atrium has a glass floor, and I was surprised to note that you could see down with a view through a transparent ceiling (the floor of part of the atrium) into the train platforms for the RER into Paris.

The Sheraton at CDG is a fun place to stay, and reminds me a little of staying at the Tokyo Railway Station Hotel, as I did a few years back (particularly in the way you see all the little people scurrying like ants so far below!). But I also have a sense that this place was designed for the future, as the French powers-that-be envisioned the future 25 years ago. They got some things right, and some things wrong (they certainly didn’t envision needing outlets for charging multiple mobile devices)—and altogether the effect is somehow a bit quaint and endearing, as if Jules Verne had designed a hotel as a stationary twentieth century flying ship!