Why Do The Wrong People Travel?

Travel, they say, improves the mind

An irritating platitude

Which frankly, entre nous

Is very far from true

Personally I've yet to find

That longitude and latitude

Can educate those scores

Of monumental bores

Who travel in groups and herds and troops

Of various breeds and sexes

Till the whole world reels

To shouts and squeals

And the clicking of Rolleiflexes

Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel

When the right people stay back home?

What compulsion compels them

And who the hell tells them

To drag their clans to Zanzibar

Instead of staying quietly in Omaha?

The Taj Mahal and the Grand Canal

And the sunny French Riviera

Would be less oppressed if the Middle West

Would settle for somewhere rather nearer

Please do not think that I criticize or cavil

At a genuine urge to roam

But why, oh, why do the wrong people travel

When the right people stay back home

And mind their business

When the right people stay back home

With Cinerama

When the right people stay back home?

I'm merely asking

Why the right people stay back home

Just when you think romance is ripe

It rather sharply dawns on you

That each sweet serenade

Is for the tourist trade

Any attractive native type

Who resolutely fawns on you

Will give as his address

American Express

There isn't a rock between Bangkok

And the beaches of Hispaniola

That does not recoil

From suntan oil

And the gurgle of Coca-Cola

Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel

When the right people stay back home?

What explains this mass mania

To leave Pennsylvania

And clack around like flocks of geese

Demanding dry martinis on the isles of Greece?

In the smallest street where the gourmets meet

They invariably fetch up

And it's hard to make them accept a steak

That isn't served rare and smeared with ketchup

Millions of tourists are churning up the gravel

While they gaze at Saint Peter's dome

But why, oh, why do the wrong people travel

When the right people stay back home

And eat hot doughnuts

When the right people stay back home

With all those benefits

When the right people stay back home?

I sometimes wonder

Why the right people stay back home

What peculiar obsessions

Inspire those processions

Of families from Houston, Tex

With all those cameras around their necks?

They will take a train or an aeroplane

For an hour on the Costa Brava

And they'll see Pompeii on the only day

When it's up to its neck in molten lava

It would take years to unravel, ravel, ravel

Every impulse that makes them roam

But why, oh, why do the wrong people travel

When the right people stay back home

With all that Kleenex

When the right people stay back home

With Dr. Brothers

When the right people stay back home

With all those Kennedys

When the right people stay back home?

Won't someone tell me

Why the right, I said the right, people stay away back home?