The Snowbirds Have Landed - Day 5

Tuesday started quite cold but dry and we went to a few retail stores in Greensboro but bought very little. Once again I was able to use my UK membership card at Costco which was cool.

Then we went for lunch......to Hooters !!! Now for anyone who hasn't been to one of these places or never even heard of them, let me enlighten you.

Hooters is a restaurant chain with many locations in the USA and internationally from Argentina to Venezuela. There is even a branch in the UK - in Nottingham of all places. How did London miss out ??? Although rightly famous for it's hot chicken wings, it's even more famous, or maybe that should be infamous, for it's 'serving girls' who wear a uniform that would make Hugh Hefner proud. I couldn't bring myself to openly take a photo of any of them when they were facing me and so I took the cowards way out and waited till they had their....backs.....to me. I could pretend that this was to protect their privicy (who knows, maybe some parent or husband was totally unaware of their daughter/wife leading such a colourful life in the catering industry) but really it was more to do with me being too shy to point the camera at any of them.

While nothing is actually exposed, little is left to the imagination either. Lets put it this way, Roseanne Barr, Rosie O'Donnell, Anne Widdecombe and even Laura Davies need not apply for work at a Hooters restaurant. Thankfully neither should any anorexic catwalk model as Hooters girls are not recruited from either extreme. Just good looking, homely, fit, attractive, stunning girls who then wear small tight tops and even smaller tighter shorts. I've no idea what I ordered and I've no idea if it was any good but I've never looked around more and listened less to my eating companions in any restaurant before in my life.

Good food.....who the hell cares !

We then went to a local pet store as the kids have been thinking of getting a puppy to go with the 2 cats. I can see problems there and I think that Chester will just live in the closet if and when a puppy arrives on the scene. I'm not a dog person really but they had some cuties in this store. I loved that they had little booths set aside for customers to take a puppy from it's cage and be with it in some sort of privacy - to get the bonding session going I suppose.

Very effective from a selling point of view as it would be hard to say no after spending 10 mins or more being licked to death by a frisky cute puppy.

This was the little fella they really loved but at $1000, it may have to remain a dream doggie.

The store had no kittens, which pissed me off a bit so I had to content myself with thwe puppies and a load of exotic birds which were very colourful but didn't have the awwwww factor that kittens evoke.

We left the pets and did more shopping and later had another meal at a place so memorable that I've already forgotten it. I just know it wasn't Hooters again. Say what you like about sexism and scantily clad females being used to 'sell' a place or a product but.....it works.

We all came back to our campsite for a final chat and the kids left as they'd work the next day and we were leaving for places south. We'd already decided to pass on spending time in Savannah (sorry, Paula but we'll visit your restaurant some other time) and planned on driving close to our winter home in Sebring the next day.

I liked Greensboro. It had everything you'd expect in a medium sized city and doesn't get extremes of weather. It's not in tornado alley, doesn't get earthquakes (as far as I know) or hurricanes, gets barably cold in winter and acceptably warm in summer and even has the other two season as well.

But best of all, it has a Hooters !!