WHY DO THE WRONG PEOPLE TRAVEL?

"Why do the wrong people 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 Riviera
Would be less oppressed
If the Middle West
Would settle for somewhere rather nearer."

This windy Monday swept me to the Tower of London, a popular tourist spot that instantly took me to these famous lyrics penned by the United Kingdom's own national treasure Sir Noel Coward.

I was quietly marveling at the humbling history that is the Tower of London when out of the corner of my eye I see an empty Coca-Cola bottle hurtling toward a trash can as though it were a basketball.

The simplest Texan-twang then peeled through the quiet cool morning breeze,"Hey, y'all, did y'all see? I almost made it in!"

My mortification was complete when I heard the teenager's chaperone yell, "That's alright Brad, try again!"

Gentle readers,

"Please do not think that I criticize or cavil
At a genuine urge to roam.
But why, or why, do the wrong people travel
When the right people stay back home?"

Andrew Martinez

Writer

Magazine Journalism