Puzzle Hunt 06: Stepping Stones

Question

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_{This is part six in my clichéd treasure island puzzle series, but can be solved on its own. The story carries on from part five.}

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Based on the information from the notebook, you at least know where to start. You head towards the sound of rushing water - briefly wondering what happened to your friends Frank and Joan - before deciding that they must not have been important enough to the plot to warrant keeping around.

You arrive at a densely bushed riverbed, and find a short path between the foliage to the riverside. Looking across the river you see another such path leading away a bit downstream. Bridging the river is a grid of perfectly flat almost square stepping stones, apparently engraved with some form of ancient hieroglyph.

A top-down view of the situation - you are positioned at the clearing at the top of the picture.

You take a look into the notebook to see if it has any wisdom to offer. There is a random and barely legible entry that looks like it might be related.

run run
o wot fu
n we so l
ight fl
y my two
son o ye
eh runn

Can you find a path across, and directions where to go next?

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_{Attributions: All icons courtesy of Icons8
Apologies: To all graphic designers out there offended by the multiple styles}

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Answer 1

I believe the answer is:

NOW WEST, FOLLOW YOUR NOSE

This works as follows:

For finding the path, we note that every icon corresponds to a word. Some of the words on adjacent tiles can be concatenated to form new words; for example the icon just below the entry point shows "honey", and the icon below this gives "moon", together giving "honeymoon". It turns out that we can make a path from the top of the river to the bottom of the river such that all consecutive words on the path form such a pair:



(Note that there are a lot of other pairs of icons that might also be linked, but this was the only path I was able to find.)
Now we still need to find where to go, but luckily, we still have the notebook entry! Each of the lines in this entry contains exactly 6 characters (excluding spaces), and there are seven lines. Coincidentally, there are also 7 rows of 6 stones each in the river, so it makes sense to link each character to one of the stones. This gives the following picture:



Reading off all the letters along the path gives the given answer.