Monday Challenge: Open Road

There’s a robot around the turn, but you can’t see it from here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Roads are odd things. They start right in front of your own house, but after that they could go anywhere. And sometimes it seems like they’re trying to suck the brain right out of your head. Highway Hypnosis, my ass. Highway Brain Stretch is more like it. On a long road trip, I can feel my brain expanding.

We did a lot of driving over the last five days, between work meetings in the Nearest City of Any Size and a camping trip on the side of a mountain. The Husband drove for most of it, leaving me free to daydream out the window. Which I did. A lot. I also, when asked for a story, made up the tale of Sir Jack and Lady Snow, two knights on a long trip and their return home. They were racing the sun, because when the darkness came, the road would no longer be safe.*

There’s just something about the sight of an open road that brings out my creativity. I get the best plot spackle on the road. And while I don’t tend to get full-fledged ideas, I do get the seeds of ideas. The things that, once planted in the fertile soil of my hindbrain, will grow into something worth thinking about. I’m a mobile seed collector on long trips, the idea-spores clinging to me like burrs to a dog’s fur.

Of course, I can’t do anything about those ideas on the road. That’s what home is for. The road is for gathering; home is for making something useable out of the stuff you accumulated.

So, I honour of my brain-enhancing road trips, I present your Monday Challenge: write me a journey. Not the start, not the end. Just the part in the middle. The space between. The time when anything might happen.

I’m going to start growing some of these ideas.

* It was a fun story. They found their way with the aid of magic boxes created by an undead sorcerer named Steve of Jobs.