What do you do when wanderlust strikes and there are no trips on your horizon? I switch on my iPod and dial up the playlist of my favorite travel tunes.

It's quite a list, with everyone from Woody Guthrie ("Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad") to the Indigo Girls ("Get Out the Map") to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers ("Roadrunner"). When you think about it, travel, with its themes of freedom and discovery, its yearnings, its romance and danger, its emotional extremes and the rhyming possibilities of all those exotic places, is just made for song.

And now, if we can please get Casey Kasem to step up to the mike, here are my top 10 travel tunes, in no particular order. (In tribute to Spinal Tap, this list actually goes to 11.)

"Come Fly With Me" by Frank Sinatra: Ol' Blue Eyes racks up the frequent-flier miles on this lighthearted, infectious paean to wanderlust. Jumping from Capri to Mandalay to Brazil, the album of the same name is filled with smile-inducing lyrics such as "let's take a powder/to Boston for chowder." I'm picking the title song, a nostalgic souvenir of the age when commercial air travel was fresh, new and glamorous: "Once I get you up there, where the air is rarefied/We'll just glide, starry eyed." Ah, those were the days.

"Every Picture Tells a Story" by Rod Stewart: For my money, this staccato rave-up is the best song ever recorded about coming of age on the road, a gritty and joyous travelogue across Europe and Asia. Plus, it's got great advice for the inevitable times when things go wrong: "Make the best out of a bad job and laugh it off/You didn't have to come here anyway."

"City of New Orleans" by Arlo Guthrie: Has any song better captured the romance of the rails? "Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car/Penny a point, ain't no one keepin' score/Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle/Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor." (Credit where it's due: It was written not by Guthrie but by the late, underappreciated Steve Goodman.)

"Home" by Michael Buble: This captures the melancholy and loneliness of the solo traveler trying to enjoy Paris and Rome while his heart is 10 time zones away: "Surrounded by a million people/I still feel all alone."

"I've Been Everywhere" by Johnny Cash: What's the point of traveling if you can't brag about it? Bet you didn't know the song was written by an Australian, Geoff Mack, with Australian place names ("I've been to Tullamore, Seymour, Lismore, Mooloolaba, Nambour, Maroochydore ...") and recorded by, among others, Rolf "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" Harris three decades before Johnny Cash got his hands on it.

"Promised Land" by Chuck Berry: A rollicking cross-country odyssey by train, plane and bus: "I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia/California on my mind/I straddled that Greyhound and rode it into Raleigh/and on across Caroline." Elvis Presley had a modest hit with it in 1974, one of his last, but I'll take Chuck Berry's original version, which has one more verse and one more guitar solo _ and still clocks in 44 seconds shorter.

"Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude" by Jimmy Buffett: In 1977, before he became the living embodiment of aloha shirts and umbrella drinks, Jimmy Buffett released a great album about travel. It beautifully captures the yearning for Paris when you're drunk on red wine; the last, lovely moments of a sunset cruise; and the pathos of expatriate Americans trying to live it up in Latin America. You could pick just about any song from the album _ even "Margaritaville" _ but I'm going with the title track because it evokes the pangs I always feel when I read airport departure boards.

"Marrakesh Express" by Crosby, Stills & Nash: I lament that I was born too late to have vagabonded across Asia on the so-called "Hippie Trail" in the late 1960s and early '70s. This song evokes that era of riding trains with pigs and chickens, and "buying scratchy leathers we can wear at home."

"Katmandu" by Bob Seger: Seger isn't 100 percent sure where Katmandu is, but it's hopelessly exotic and far, far away, and he knows he'll leave all his troubles behind _ if he ever gets out of here. I think we've all felt that way at some point in our lives.

"Roam" by the B-52's: The follow-up to "Love Shack" was all over the radio in 1990 when my wife, Jeri, and I were leaving on an around-the-world journey, and it became our theme for the trip. It reminds me of the giddiness we felt as we turned in the key to our apartment, shouldered our backpacks and set off to kick through continents and bust boundaries.

"Route 66" by Nat King Cole: Get hip to this timely tip: This is the all-time champion road-trip anthem, even if it does _ as my colleague Spud Hilton points out _ get the order of the towns wrong. (Motoring west, you'd hit Winona before Flagstaff.) It's been recorded by everyone from Nancy Sinatra to Buckwheat Zydeco, but I'm going with Nat King Cole, who's as smooth as a Cadillac DeVille with cruise control.

 

(E-mail Executive Travel Editor John Flinn at travel@sfchronicle.com.)

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