Possibly My Last Travel Bog Entry Ever and the Reason Why

Sunday, Oct. 28, 2018--Cincinnati

Some of you who know I am on a trip and have been reading my travel blog probably have noticed there have been no entries for the past two days.  It is because I am upset about something that has happened, and it has caused me to lose interested in writing about my travels.

Before the travel blog, I wrote long, handwritten entries into journals related to my travels.  They took a great amount of time to write.  I didn't do this just to be doing it.  These were the records of my past.  I have gone back through entries occasionally and have always been surprised to find details that my mind had forgotten.  My plans, my reasons for writing the journals, were twofold:  1) To have them to read and remind me of my travels throughout my life as I age and can no longer travel, and 2) To possibly pick out the best of the entries to write a memoir someday.

Neither of those is going to be possible now, and that is the reason I have lost interest in writing the blog.  Someone has removed about half of my handwritten journals--from the beginning of my travels in the 1970s through early 2002--from the bookshelves in my home, and these are years BEFORE my blog, so there were no other records other than those handwritten journals.  

I've known all along that people liked to read about my travels, and I didn't mind sharing them via the blog.  That's one of the reasons why I started the blog.  But since I discovered the disappearance of my early handwritten journals, I cannot keep the loss off my mind.  Next to losing Arne as my partner, it is the worse loss I have experienced in my life.  Actually, losing those journals is like losing much of my life.  Only someone who enjoys reading about my travels would have taken them, and only someone who is enough of a friend to be invited in my home would have known what they were and have had an interest in them.

Losing the journals has caused me to lose interest in writing the blog.  I tried on this trip, but while traveling, the loss of the journals has been on my mind every day.  Finally, on Friday, I just didn't want to write another blog entry.  Yesterday was the same.  And last night when I should have been sleeping but was in fact staying away suffering from the loss of the journals I decided it is time to end the blog for now.  Maybe it will come back someday, but I am not sure.  I do plan to keep traveling with trips next year tentatively planned for Bolivia and Peru and for Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, and Egypt.  But at the present time I have no interest in sharing my travels with anyone, since among the readers is likely to be the person who took my journals.

Not everyone knows I am traveling right now.  So in addition to writing this last entry in the blog, I plan to email the entry to everyone I know well.  That way, more than likely the person who took the journals (out of interest in reading about my travels, I'm sure) will realize that they should be returned to me.

If you have my journals would you PLEASE return them?

I promise I will not try to find out who had them.  They can even be sent to my sister's mailing address and I will ask her to remove them from the packaging and to discard the packaging before giving them to me, and I promise to her now and to you that I will not ask if there was any indication of where they were sent from or who might have sent them.

Randell Drum
8000 Donore Pl. #47
San Antonio, TX  78229

My sister:
Scharlotte Bradley
8415 Fredericksburg Rd. #806
San Antonio, TX  78229

PLEASE, and goodbye.

Randy