RIVER CITY JOURNAL: DON'T WORRY: IF YOU DON'T GET OUT, NOTHING WILL HAPPEN

I've been watching the travel ads and looking at some brochures and searching the Internet for some place to go.

That's an itch I get every year when the weather turns nice.

And you know how it is in Missouri: Nice weather is about as sure a thing as the stock market.

I think my wanderlust is due to the conditioning I've received from all the moves we've made. The first time I left home for any length of time was to go to college. That was in the fall.

After my wife and I were married, we moved from our luxurious attic apartment to a snazzy garden apartment next to a bread factory in October. Unless you've lived close to a bread factory, you have no idea how good it smells, particularly when the weather is cool.

We moved from Kansas City to Dallas in October. We went to the Oregon coast for the first time in October. We moved from Idaho back to Missouri in October. We moved from Southwest Missouri to Northwest Missouri in October.

So it's easy to see why I think we ought to be going somewhere in October.

So far, the brochures and ads and Web sites haven't produced any satisfactory results.

Oh, sure, I'd like to go to Venice or Barcelona or Juneau or Quebec. But I'd also like to be able to pay the utility bill when I get home.

My wife thinks I'm a little goofy because I won't even consider traveling to Mexico. And look at all those special deals in Mexico. Heck, you can to go Mexico cheaper than you can go to Des Moines for a three-day corn-growers convention.

But I don't want to go to Des Moines.

And I don't want to go to Mexico.

Here's why.

Everybody I know who goes to Mexico drinks the water. "It was such a nice hotel," they tell me later, after they've had intravenous fluids injected into their bodies. And they eat uncooked vegetables and fruits. Those warnings aren't just for show, you know.

Another thing about Mexico's travel destinations, at least the ones you see in the ads and brochures, is that they look like any other resort. A hotel room is a hotel room, folks.

But, you might well argue, millions of Americans cram into those Mexican resorts. They can't be that bad.

Good argument. I don't have a good comeback.

Except millions of people probably don't lie awake at night wondering who would bribe the Mexican government to get me out of the rat hole jail I'm sure I would have the misfortune to wind up in just because I happened to be an American tourist in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

I come by my worrying naturally. My mother is a pretty good worrier. She's worried right now that they haven't caught the guy who shot the wife of a local lawyer while she was on a fairly remote stretch of road in the Ozarks west of here just over the hill from Kelo Valley.

Why, I asked my mother, would she be worried about a man with a high-powered rifle along a road winding through the hills? There are, after all, hunters everywhere.

But what if, she said, she had to drive along that same stretch of highway? And what if that man with gun shot at her car?

I think the odds that the same gunman will shoot at my mother's car are downright slim. Just about as slim as my winding up in a Mexican jail with cockroaches and some guy from Cleveland who likes to tell jokes with puns in them.

Of course, for either of us to test the statistical probability of a Mexican jail cell or an armed man alongside an Ozark road, one of us would have to (a) actually go to Mexico or (b) drive on that lonely stretch of highway.

As I see it, it just isn't likely to happen.

Maybe I should stick to those brochures from Boise and Akron.