The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing But

This one is less pictures again. The camera comes back out in July, hopefully!

The photos below are street art from the road. Walls we passed somewhere out there, in towns whose names blur together now. Color thrown up on concrete by people we never met. I went looking through old shots this week, the way you do when you're stuck in one place and the road is somewhere else entirely.

That's where we are right now. Parked. Looking back at walls instead of driving past new ones.

Back in January, during our last home stay in Meerbusch, Annika had a dental implant placed. Routine stuff. The kind of thing you schedule around a longer stop because you can't exactly do it between campsites. Drill the post in, let it settle into the bone, come back later for the crown. Done. Tick the box. Back on the road by mid-July.

The jawbone had other plans.

When the dentist went to fit the crown recently, the implant hadn't fully bonded. The details aren't worth going into. Let's just say the appointment did not end the way anyone hoped, and the drive home was quiet.

What we know now is that this needs time. Proper time. Another six months, give or take. The body does not negotiate on this. You wait, or you wait.

So the mid-July departure? Uncertain. The timeline for getting back to Emil and the open road? Unknown. The maps are still on the wall. The route east is still drawn. It just sits there now, patient in a way we are still learning to be.

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with this. Not dramatic. Not catastrophic. Just the slow deflation of a plan you'd been quietly building toward for months. You know the feeling. The holiday that got cancelled the week before. The move that slipped a season. The thing you were ready for, that simply wasn't ready for you.

And here's the part that stings a little. We had momentum. Season 05 wrapped well. The next leg was mapped, the rig was sorted, the head was already somewhere past the Czech border. Then one appointment, one stubborn millimeter of bone, and all of it goes back in the drawer.

Travel life looks like freedom from the outside. In many ways it is. But it runs on the same unpredictability as any life, just with the furniture rearranged. Bodies don't care about departure dates. Jawbones especially. The road will not hold your spot, but it also will not give it away. It just waits.

So we wait too. We'll figure it out. We always do.

And if you're sitting somewhere waiting for the right moment to start something, the trip, the move, the whole different life, know this. There is no moment that will cooperate fully.

There may be a faster way through this. The current idea is a bridge instead of another implant, which would not cost us another six months of waiting. We need to figure it out.

In the meantime we lean into being home. Friends and family within reach. An evening at the planetarium. The cinema. A slow afternoon at the spa. My third talk coming up at the Toastmasters meeting, where I get to stand up and tell stories from the road. All the small things you don't get to do too often when the road is the home.

You plan, life adjusts, you plan again. That isn't the detour. That's the road.

Explore. Dream. Discover.