Small Towns, Friendly People

Cochran, Georgia isn't large enough to have a rental car agency so Denny and I had to reserve a car in Warner Robins. Although Warner Robins is fairly sizable and has a large employee base in the Robins Air Force Base the friendliness of the people we dealt with while shopping was more like what you'd find in a much smaller town. Perhaps Southerners simply have not yet succombed to the hurly-burly-I'm-the-only-important-person-in-this-world attitude that seems to have taken over the populace of our country.

While waiting for our rental car to be cleaned and prepped for us we chatted with the reservation clerk and discovered his father lived not too far from the Escapees organization in Texas. We talked cold weather, snow in Seattle, football, heavy duty trucks and traveling. There's no rush in our life and it's wonderful to be able to talk while waiting for the car to be ready and not feel pressed for time or angry that a car wasn't sitting there available for us. Who knows--perhaps by being courteous and friendly we got a better vehicle than we would have if we had been abrupt and impatient (we got the Grand Prix instead of the Taurus).

It's towns like this that make it hard to choose where to settle down eventually. We've already decided that there's no perfect climate in the U.S. so a lot of our decision will be based on cost of living and the "feel" of the area. That's something that's hard to explain. We hate the traffic in Atlanta but don't mind it in Phoenix; traffic may be similar but we feel at home in Phoenix. Can't explain it, it just does. So we make mental notes of the towns where people still take the time to talk with you instead of leaving you to your own devices as you wait, where the temperatures are moderate and the traffic is not so bad. But it's not time to settle yet. Oh no, not yet.