The roads in Iceland look more like winding, gravel foot paths than, well, roads. Amidst the moon-like lava rock there are plenty of places to wander off the track and fall into a hole (or something like that); this is why they tell you to stay on the main roads and don’t go off the path. So when we began driving around the outskirts of Reykjavik, we were being careful, but also we didn’t really expect to get into trouble in the city.
Wrong.
It had been a few hours already when we saw the lighthouse in the distance. Letting our curiosity be our guides, we started driving towards it. It was a pretty drive—the water was on our left and the puffins were out fishing. In the distance, was an island with unusual looking houses on it. Transfixed by the mystery of the lighthouse, we wound along various roads, trying to find a way to the pier where it stood. And slowly there started to be some unusual sights for a road: suddenly we were much closer to the water than we had been and now instead of grass on one side there was grass on two sides. A team of soccer players jogged by. One of them gave us a strange look, which I think roughly translates into “look at those morons on the walking path.” A moment later, we saw a sign depicting a car with a big red “X” through it followed by a little stick person walking.
Being that we were in the middle of a park, there was no place to go but forwards. So we did. We got a lot of weird looks, but we laughed like crazy when we finally got back to the road. That’s the thing with straying from the path. Sometimes, you have to step away from your plans—or outline—and follow that mystery, because you never know what great story will emerge from the adventure. Sometimes, the best discoveries when writing come from following the unexpected twists in our imaginations.
The Novel Shrink 