I’m not what you’d call an experienced traveler. I think that makes me extra observant when my husband and I travel — except when I doze off, which I tend to do in a moving vehicle of any kind. That’s why we don’t travel by motorcycle. Also why I don’t think space travel would be worth the cost for me.

Anyway, the downside of being an inexperienced traveler is it’s easy to embarrass yourself, get confused, destroy a hotel room, that sort of thing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I mentioned in a previous column that we planned to celebrate our 35th anniversary with a trip to France, which we did in October. I think you’d enjoy looking at our photos. We have upwards of 10,000 so it could take a while. 

We nearly burned our hotel down, but we didn’t take photos of that. Our travel agent had warned us that the French have different wall sockets, so we bought a power converter. All was well until we plugged in my white noise machine. To clarify, it’s a machine that makes white noise, not a noise machine that happens to be white. Who needs one of those?

I often travel with my white noise machine because I don’t sleep as well in a hotel as I do in a moving vehicle. But moments after we plugged the machine into the converter and turned it on, it stopped making white noise and started making black smoke.

I’m joking. There was no smoke, and where there’s no smoke there’s no fire either. So we didn’t actually come close to burning the hotel down. That would have been embarrassing. But I had to sleep with no sound machine and a lingering odor reminiscent of burning tires.

Weights and measurements caused me some confusion too. The fact that they do things differently in France became clear when I stepped on a scale in our Paris hotel room. Yes, there really was a scale in our bathroom. That’s something you don’t see every day. Thankfully. 

You would think weighing yourself while you’re traveling in a country known for its cuisine might take the fun out of the vacation. But when I stepped on this scale, it showed that I’d lost more than half my body weight.

I was planning to eat a lot more French pastries until my husband reminded me that they use the metric system. Those weren’t pounds; they were kilograms. In order to find my actual weight I would need to multiply the number by 2.2. Oh.

It wasn’t just my husband who witnessed my metric mess-ups. Everyone exercising in the hotel workout room did when I went there to fend off the effects of the pastries.

I picked up a dumbbell with “ten” on it and immediately dropped it on the floor narrowly missing my foot. Darn kilograms! That’s when I decided it’s dangerous for me to exercise in any country where they use the metric system.

I don’t think the metric system explains why they number their floors wrong — I mean differently — in France. But for some reason, the first floor of hotels and other buildings we visited was numbered zero, the second floor was one and the basement was minus one. I even saw a minus two on an elevator button in one building.

Not once during our entire trip did I get off on the right floor on my first try. I’d step off, look around and mutter something like “What have they done with the lobby?” Other guests would smile patronizingly. Some even laughed out loud. It was humiliating.

That’s when I’d repeat to myself the mantra of the inexperienced traveler. “I’ll never see these people again.”

Dorothy Rosby is the author of ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate; Holidays, Special Occasions and Other Times Our Celebrations Get Out of Hand and other books. Contact her at www.dorothyrosby.com/contact.