Ask someone what visitors should see in their town and they will rattle off a confident list: the museum, the overlook, the historic district, that one restaurant. Then ask when they last went themselves. The silence is usually about a decade long.
We save our curiosity for places that require a boarding pass. Meanwhile the place we actually live sits unexplored, five miles in every direction, waiting for us to notice it the way a visitor would.
The Five Mile Rule
Here is a small challenge with a big return: once a month, visit something within five miles of home that you have never seen, or have not seen in ten years. That is the whole rule. It costs almost nothing, it requires no packing, and it reliably produces the thing we usually fly somewhere to find, which is the feeling of discovering something.
Familiarity is not the same as knowledge. Most of us have a commute-shaped map of our town and call it the whole city.
Where to Start Looking
- The attraction you send visitors to. Go stand in your own museum, garden, or historic site on a quiet weekday morning. It is a different place without an itinerary attached.
- The farmers market you always mean to visit. Go hungry, talk to the growers, and buy one vegetable you cannot identify. Dinner becomes a small adventure.
- A walking tour of your own downtown. Many towns offer them through the historical society, and being a tourist on your own main street is a strangely delightful experience. You will learn three things you will repeat for years.
- The restaurant one neighborhood over. Not the famous one. The small family-run place with the hand-lettered specials board that you have driven past two hundred times.
- Live music in a small room. A local jazz night, a brewery with a bluegrass trio, a community theater. Talent is everywhere, and it is ten minutes from your house.
Bring Someone Along
Exploring locally is even better as a shared project. Trade picks with your spouse or a friend, alternating who chooses the month’s outing, with a standing rule that nobody is allowed to veto. Grandkids make outstanding tour companions too, partly because everything is new to them and partly because their questions force you to actually read the plaques.
Some couples keep a running list on the refrigerator, adding every place a friend mentions or a local article praises. The list does the remembering so a random free Saturday does not default to errands.
Fall Makes This Easy
The next few months are peak season for exactly this. Harvest festivals, fall markets, high school football under the lights, studio tours, and small-town main street events all crowd the calendar between September and Thanksgiving. Check your town’s event listings once a week and you will find more happening within five miles than you can possibly attend.
So here is the question for this weekend: what is the one place in your own town you always recommend but have not actually visited in years? Go be its tourist. The line is shorter than you think.
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Ronald J. Briggs Jr., FIC, CRPC®, is an industry veteran with more than four decades of experience and the founder of Briggs Financial Group, Wealth Advisors (BFG). Alongside his team of tax and risk mitigation specialists, Ron serves clients across the U.S. from dual national headquarters in Brighton, Michigan and Bonita Springs, Florida.
BFG grew out of a firm Ron founded in late 2010: Caitlin John Private Wealth Management, a fiduciary Registered Investment Advisor named for the middle names of his and his wife Kristin's two children. His vision was to build a fiduciary-based advisory practice capable of serving his clients and the generations that follow them.
The boutique feel and personalized experience Ron's clients came to expect drew the attention of other advisors, both locally and nationally, and the firm grew accordingly. Each of those advisors joined Caitlin John to practice under a truly independent, fiduciary RIA while keeping the individual brand and identity they had built in their own community.
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