The mantra of the inexperienced traveler

By Dorothy Rosby

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.

To read more of Dorothy’s story subscribe today.