Why Do the Wrong People Travel?

Travel they say improves the mind,
An irritating platitude, which frankly, entrenous,
Is very far from true.

Personally I’ve yet to find that longtitude and latitude
can educate those scores of monumental bores
Who travel in groups and herds and troupes
Of varying breeds and sexes
Till the whole world reels to shouts and squeals
And the clicking of Roliflexes.

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 cans to Zanzibar, instead of staying quietly in Omaha
The Taj Mahal and the Grand Canal
And the sunny French Rivera
Would be less oppressed if the Middle West
Would settle for somewhere rather nearer
Please do not think that I criticize or cavel 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 television
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 Hispianola
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
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
And eat hot doughnuts
when the right people stay back home
with all that lettuce
when the right people stay back home
I sometimes wonder
why the right people stay back home

Why do the wrong people travel, travel travel
When 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 ass in molten lava!
Millions of tourists are churning up the gravel
While they gaze at St. Peter's Dome,
But why oh WHY do the wrong people travel
When the right people stay at home."
and play canasta
when the right people stay back home
won’t someone tell me
why the right people stay back home