There are a lot of tournaments in my area, as this is a major metropolis. If you're willing to go to the suburbs, you could find a chess tournament to play in on most weekends. There are a couple different series that are monthly and then there are occasionally other tournaments. One thing I have also noticed is that some people play in them rather frequently, and that there are a number of juniors that play in a large percentage of these events and they rapidly improve up to the class A/Expert level. I don't think this correlation of their activity to their rapid rating increase is a coincidence. While they are surely doing stuff besides going to tournaments (maybe not!), playing 120 tournament games in a year certainly seems to be very helpful in attaining that level of play (even if a lot are G/30 or G/45). I noticed one junior made the jump from an established rating of 1100 to 1800 in one year - including some wandering around at 1400 for several tournaments, so he wasn't terribly underrated the entire time.
If I really wanted to improve when I was younger, I really should have taken more of the opportunities I was presented to play strong opposition. I didn't quite have this many opportunities, but I certainly could have played more than I did against stronger opponents than I did. Once the wife and I get a car again, I'm going to try to play at least once per month. I'm not a teen, so I can't have that kind of trajectory anymore, but there are worse ways to improve than to play in tournaments frequently.
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