Join the Navy and see the world?

Sure, but the U.S. Congress offers more user-friendly locales, better food and spiffier accommodations. Plus, you can bring the family -- and leave the plastic at home.

It's the difference between the chow line and a berth on a destroyer and, say, a room and four-star cuisine at the Inn at Perry Cabin, overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, where the digs start at $310 a night.

Or Paris.

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From January 2000 to January 2006, Senate and House members logged 6,767 trips, foreign and domestic, paid for to the tune of $20 million by an assortment of interest groups, according to research by the nonpartisan Political Money Line.

Reported reasons for the trips include conferences, fact-finding on issues covered by their committees, speaking engagements, and workshops.

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn is 11th on a list of 639 members. Travel cost his sponsors $158,766 for 53 trips spanning 154 days. The list includes travel for members who have since left Congress.

By comparison, the rest of the state's members were virtual stay-at-homes.

Over the 73-month span, 10 South Carolina members logged 106 trips costing $288,304, an average of $2,720 a trip. Their travel covered all or parts of 334 days.

Political Money Line's Web reports are compiled from data required to be filed with the House and Senate clerks. Issue-related

Clyburn, a seven-term Democrat from Columbia, said the trips provide insight into issues that members must deal with.

"I just spent eight days in Africa. When the issue of a supplemental appropriation for Liberia came up, I was able to give them firsthand knowledge of what I saw there," he said, and the Appropriations Committee "promptly appropriated $50 million in emergency funds" for the strife-torn nation founded by freed American slaves.

"I could tell them I stood in a country where there was not a single residence with electricity, and we needed to do something to get the (power) grid turned on," Clyburn said.

There's nothing like eyeballing a situation, he said.

A trip to France involved studying that nation's nuclear power-generating facilities. With much of South Carolina's power nuclear-generated, Clyburn said, "how can I be knowledgeable unless I go over and see it?"

Clyburn attributed his high ranking to assiduously following House rules that require members to file reports on any trip costing $200 or more.

"That's what I do," including reporting two nights in a monastery at Moncks Corner sponsored by the Faith and Politics Institute, he said. "Most members of this Congress don't do that. I'd be near the bottom if everybody up here filed what they're supposed to file. No good deed goes unpunished."

John Crangle, director of the state chapter of Common Cause, said his organization is "very concerned about any type of gratuity that's given by a private interest to a public official because of the danger of undue or improper influence." Common Cause promotes governmental and political reform and monitors the influence of money on public life in America.

"Some of these trips might be justified, but our view is if a public official needs to take a trip that's in the public interest, then it needs to be paid for by government funds," Crangle said. "If it's for themselves, they ought to pay for it. Privately funded travel in Washington has gotten completely out of hand."

Spouses, too

Adding spouses and family members to such trips "indicates a private interest being served," Crangle said.

Butler Derrick, who represented the 3rd Congressional District for 20 years before retiring at the end of 1994, said, "It's an abuse that ought to be brought to a screeching halt. Back in the '70s and '80s and probably the '90s, too, it got out of hand. It pollutes the system."

Tommy Hartnett, a Republican U.S. House member from Charleston in the 1980s, said he didn't recall taking any privately funded trips and few paid for by the taxpayers.

"If it has no public purpose, it ought not to be done," Hartnett said. "They ought to do away with all of that, like they did with honoraria," he said, referring to the congressional ban on monetary payments for speeches.

Top traveler

The No. 1 congressional traveler, according to Kent Cooper and Tony Raymond, Money Line's founders, is Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He racked up travel costing his sponsors $191,218, although Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., scored the most trips, 69.

Earlier this month, in a Congress buffeted by money-related scandals surrounding some members' too-cozy ties to lobbyists, the Senate rejected a proposal to ban most privately funded travel, meals and gifts.

The vote on the Democratic initiative was along party lines, 55-44.

Clyburn's free travels, sometimes with his wife and/or daughter along, took him to Paris, Palm Springs, Havana, Jackson Hole, Orlando, Nassau, Miami, Beijing, Santa Fe, and Punta Cana, a coastal resort area in the Dominican Republic.

Scattered among the exotic were the mundane: Columbia, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Memphis, Fort Lauderdale, Montgomery, Detroit, Roanoke, Louisville, Raleigh, Jackson and Lewisburg, W.Va.

Sponsors' costs ranged from the $19,123 the U.S.-Asia Foundation shelled out for a four-day fact-finding trip to Beijing and Shijiazhuang in October 2003 to $240 for the Congressional Black Caucus Southern Regional Issues Forum in Jackson, Miss., for one day in August 2005.

In between, Political Money Line reported, were: