I didn't go further than about a mile in any direction from my house. This is suburbia, most people have large, mature trees, and in fact, many of the developments in the 1980s and early 1990s were carved into the woodlands, leaving as much as possible on the building lots.
And, we have municipal-sponsored, partially subsidized garbage, recycling, and yard waste cleanup here. So, pretty much everyone does it.
As a result, it's not at all difficult to come up with 500 bags of leaves. One house on a heavily tree'd lot had about 70 bags of oak leaves at the curb. Many have 10 to 20 at the curb.
The only thing I regret is I don't have more time and a larger vehicle. I can generally get between 12 and 14/15 bags in per trip. So, it was a lot of trips. Round trip time probably averages 10-12 minutes, so I can usually gather about 50 to 60 bags in an hour. My fantasy would be to have some kind of big truck where I could get 40-50 bags per trip. But otherwise, no, I like my small Chevy.
I haven't had to compete with the trash pickup for them yet this year -- people got out and did a lot of cleaning with the nice March weather, and our pickup doesn't start until this Thursday here.
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