Syd Rich: 91 Incorporated Places in Arizona

So on Friday while I was working with one of my students, Katy, I was thinking about Hailey Devine's (a famous mormon videographer/blogger/) video of going to twelve countries in twelve months, and I was thinking how freaking rich I would have to be in order to do that, but how freaking cool it would be if I could.
So I had a not as grand idea of traveling all over Arizona, and documenting that. So I looked up how many cities/towns there are in Arizona. I took the list from wikipedia (I know you should never trust wikipedia, but I am for this project) which defines a city/town as incorporated places with home rule and having possession of a local government. So it turns out there is 91 (I looked up later how many there are including unincorporated ones as well, and that list was waaay to big, I will save that for another year). Then I mapped them all out on google maps, and it became my goal for 2015 to go to all 91 incorporated places.

So after mapping them all out I figured I wouldn't want to go to all 91 cities on my own, and I figured not just one person would be able to come with me to all 91, so I developed a "team". I put that in quotation marks because Steph and Matt were making fun of my word choice for it because there are no other teams doing this that we are racing against. Anyway, so I've convinced a great select people to come on these adventures with me, and it's going to be quite the adventure.

I don't really know the plan for this, and since I am a college student with a crazy schedule, planning it isn't going to work, so I am just playing it by ear and going when I can with whoever can come with me. I also don't know what my mission is when I am in all these places, but maybe I will think of a grand idea along the way. For now, it's just good old fun so next year I can say I've been to all 91 incorporated places in Arizona.

So when I told Steph and Annabeth about my new goal, they were pretty enthusiastic and wanted to knock some cities out that day after I got out of school. So I got all my equipment together and we headed out. We knocked off South Tucson (yes, apparently that is its own city), Sahuarita, Nogales and Patagonia.

South Tucson is confusing, I think it should all just be Tucson. When we were in Sahuarita, I yelled at a guy in the car next to us to ask for directions to somewhere and all he said was ¿como? #southernAZprobs. When we went to Nogales (which by the way is the closest I have ever been to the Mexico border, sorry Mom) we wanted to eat at an authentic Mexican restaurant. While we were driving towards one we found on yelp, Steph saw this cute little restaurant so we agreed to go there... it was italian... but it was good! When we went to Patagonia, it was dark outside so we couldn't really see the mountain empire that it is, but we did find a cool looking saloon, a mural, a methodist church, and a super cute market.

I of course documented all of it with mostly videos. I am still trying to decide if I am going to make one big video with all 91 places, or if I am going to make videos by the days I go. So we will see. But for now here are a few photos that I took while we were adventuring.