For all the hubbub about the two Nebraska guys going to every BUT NOT EVERY town in Iowa, there’s another cross-state trekker out there, and he’s doing it the hard way.
For the last six years, Tyler Sullivan of North Liberty has been running to reach not just every county, not just every incorporated place, but every dot on the state map.
When the Mason City Globe Gazette profiled Sullivan in April (link via Marshalltown Times-Republican), he had run in 84 counties. That included doing 21 miles in Tama County (but how do you even reach a mile in Dinsdale?). He did Marshall County in May.
According to the Estherville News on July 1, he’d gotten up to 90 counties and 913 towns (not specified as to type). At the end of August, the Le Mars Sentinel said “he even does the unincorporated communities like Seney.”
I tried to find Sullivan’s current status and came across a Facebook post from a page mentioned in one of the stories. He posted on Oct. 1 that he had approximately 150 places on the state map remaining, in eight counties, and would do them over the next two years.
When he completes that, he will to my knowledge be the fifth person to visit every incorporated community in Iowa, and the first to visit every map dot. Not even I got that granular, and though I might have a good percentage of the unincorporated villages, there’s no way I’m going to be driving from Sewal to Meyer any time soon.