During 2020, my wife and I made the decision that we would live in our current house until retirement. In a bit of bad timing, she had bought it a few weeks before we started dating, but wouldn’t have done so had we already met. The house just isn’t quite big enough for us, its layout limits how we can use the space we do have, and it’s not in the part of town that I prefer.
But it doesn’t make sense, financially or otherwise, to remedy that. It’s good enough1 for us.
So with that decision behind us, we started to invest ourselves a bit more in what we now consider to be our long-term neighborhood.
If you’re new to an area—or, like us, you’ve decided that this will be home for awhile—here are some ways that you can better connect to the place you live, along with some personal examples of what we’ve done since making that decision.
Adopt a quest to visit all the…(pick something!)
Visit every coffeeshop. Every bar. Every city park. Every takeout restaurant. Every museum. Every hiking trail.
Choose something—whatever appeals to you—and then go explore all of them.
It’s a fun way to add a goal and some structure to your local explorations, and you’re almost certain to find a “favorite” amongst the list. Here’s my mini guide to adopting a quest if you want some helping in getting started.
Personal examples:
If you know anything about me, you know I love quests. So of course I have a number of examples here, from broader metro area ones I adopted prior to this house to local neighborhood ones selected after we decided to stay put.
- Grab a pint at every craft brewery in the metro area
- Try out every bar within biking distance of our house
- Hike every official City of Phoenix trail
- Visit every museum in the metro area
- Eat at every “sketchy” Chinese restaurant bounded by two freeways
- (more examples at Scott’s Local Quests)
Learn the local history
Connecting with your local community can mean better understanding the history of how it became what it is today. You very well might be surprised at what you learn; you can find interesting historical facets in nearly every community
- Find a book on the history of your town (this photo book series offers a large catalog of options)
- Visit the local historical society or history museum
- Look at historical photos, maps, and satellite imagery (Google Earth’s historical satellite view is an easy place to start)
Personal example
When health issues sidelined all of our travel in 2023, we decided to spend our weekends visiting every local museum in the county. Many of these ended up being local historical society museums, which provided a fascinating education on how Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs came to be. Even though I grew up here, I learned a lot more than I expected—especially about our own little neighborhood, which is still considered one of the “newish” parts of the city. Who knew there was much “history” to learn about!
Just one example: a small hill behind some houses just down the road from us was home to a temporary camp that famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright built and lived at while designing a fancy resort for the surrounding property that never got built because the Great Depression hit right after he completed the plans and investor funding dried up. What an interesting little factoid!
Walk, run, or cycle your neighborhood
Use an app like CityStrides or World Uncovered and walk, run, or cycle all the streets of your neighborhood or city. Get some exercise while exploring the streets where you live.
Want to add an extra degree of difficulty? Make it a scavenger hunt.
Personal examples:
- During the pandemic, I walked every public roadway in a mile radius of our house. It was an excellent way to get a sense of the neighborhoods beyond our own. (We live in a place known as “The World’s Largest Cul-de-sac,” so this was actually a much larger endeavor than you’d otherwise expect.)
- My wife and I adopted a quest to ride every public street in our part of the city after getting ebikes last year. A couple injuries for me, and a couple surgeries for her, have sidelined our progress this year, but it’s something we’ll get back to as soon as the temps drop below 100º.
Do some research
Your explorations may inspire you to do a bit of additional research on your own. This can be a fun way to learn more about the place you live, as internet sleuthing has a way of surfacing interesting tidbits as you dive into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, just as we followed links in the “Web 1.0” era.
Choose some questions to answer:
- When was your city/town founded, and what made people settle there?
- How did your neighborhood or major streets get their names?
- Who were prominent early leaders? Important industries? Famous residents?
- What was the local land ownership like? Can you track down what the land underneath your feet looked like before your home was constructed?
Personal example:
After we started to visit all the local museums and read about our local history, we decided to research how history of the land that our house sits on. Contrary to commonly accepted history, we discovered that the person who was thought to have first homesteaded the land—the area’s “founder,” based on several oral histories—was not the person whose name was on the actual source documents (which are now available online through the National Archives, but weren’t easily accessible previously). In fact, there seems to be some, uhh “romatic drama” involved. We’re still compiling the research, but it seems like we might help shed new light on how this part of town actually came to be, even upending its origin story.
Become a tourist
It’s amazing how easy it is to never quite make it to the attractions that your city is known for. A simple hack is to treat yourself like a tourist—if you were just visiting for a few days, what are the things you’d want to see or do?
- Buy a guidebook (or get one from the local public library) and set a goal to complete a certain number (or all!) of the entries you haven’t done already.
- Can’t find a guidebook for your town? Ask the local tourism board to create a list of the top 25 must-dos in your area, then mark them off.
Personal examples:
While we haven’t purchased a guidebook, we have put together a number of lists based on articles, books, or apps to help ensure that we get to many of the local attractions that we might not otherwise seek out. We also adopted a quest to visit the “Phoenix Points of Pride” which is, in effect, a list of city attractions.
^1: “Enough” is a pretty important concept for us. I feel like it’s something that doesn’t get enough attention in our society. Lots of things are perfectly enough, even if they’re, well, not exactly perfect. “Enough” provides you freedom; it frees you from relentlessly optimizing, from never being satisfied because a slightly better option might still be out there. Put another way, being content with 88% of what you want is better than being frustrated with having 95% simply because you think you should be at 100%.
- “Enough” is a pretty important concept for us. I feel like it’s something that doesn’t get enough attention in our society. Lots of things are perfectly enough, even if they’re, well, not exactly perfect. “Enough” provides you freedom; it frees you from relentlessly optimizing, from never being satisfied because a slightly better option might still be out there. Put another way, being content with 88% of what you want is better than being frustrated with having 95% simply because you think you should be at 100%. ↩︎