Delightfully tacky…yet unrefined.™ These four little words sum up the Hooters experience nicely (which might explain why the phrase is Hooters’ tagline).

To give you an idea of how far behind I am…we went 9/12/09…

There’s not much I can say over and above their tagline…the bathroom is a little on the “tacky” side without being overly so. The wood paneling maintains the feel of the restaurant, sort of down-homey and garage-y without being a down-home/garage theme…if that makes any sense. I liked the orange diamond (in the event you weren’t aware, bright orange is Hooters’ primary color) randomly placed between the urinals. They have a couple items on the walls, as you can see in the entrance picture, and I wasn’t able to get a good shot (people started filing in) but they have advertisements and the Playboy cover featuring Hooters. A quick search on Google turned up a bunch of issues, since I didn’t remember to check which issue’s cover they had posted (that’s gotta be a Trivial Pursuit question somewhere…”Which issue of Playboy is featured in the bathroom at Hooters of Natomas?”) Four rolls because it’s clean and above average…they carried over the design from the restaurant and provided me with the sports section to read (see the newspaper above the urinal in picture #2).

Rating:

So I wasn’t really sure how to categorize this one, after all, Sport Clips really isn’t a barber shop, it’s more of a “hair salon for guys.” But I digress…this is about bathrooms, not how to categorize them…well, maybe I should add that feature…

For what it’s worth, these were taken Sunday 9/6/09…I’m still catching up.

I should have gotten some close-ups of the photos on the walls, there’s a really cool one with construction workers playing golf on the framework of a high-rise building. There aren’t any walls surrounding them…you can kinda see it off to the right. A couple of other funny photos, the central one in the first picture is three guys helping a fourth (well, the one is  just looking on, must be a government worker) attempt to retrieve his ball from a particularly nasty sandtrap, and there’s another of what looks to be 1920′s-era men playing golf while their suit pants are ironed (unfortunately that one was out of the picture). Funny stuff!

I liked that they carried the color scheme throughout the bathroom…this is what I’m talking about when I say if people would just put a little more effort into bathrooms, maybe they wouldn’t be so maligned! Anyway…four rolls because it’s clean and they actually put some thought into it…bravo!

Rating:

Wow…

…just…wow…and I mean that in the absolute best of ways.

Now…this isn’t some crazy kitschy bathroom (though it would be a lot more fun if more were…but I think I beat that dead horse to it’s seventh or eighth death last post).

However…it is a gas station bathroom…and usually that phrase “gas station bathroom” evicts terrible horrible thoughts, thoughts that the toilet might eat you (or at least everything living on it) and the fear that washing your hands might be worse for you than not.

This is the nicest cleanest gas station bathroom I’ve ever been in. Ever. If you’ve ever gone with me on a roadtrip, you know I use gas station bathrooms almost more than professional truck drivers/travellers/college students on road trips. Probably more than some of them do. Yeah, I’m that guy. Seriously, these guys should be on the list of bathrooms gas stations should aspire to have.

Now, you’re probably thinking “Big deal…they’re in Lincoln, CA of all places…how busy could they be?) Well…I’ll answer that for you. With 12 pumps (no, not quite as big as the superstations on Interstates and freeways, but bigger than a lot of gas stations I’ve seen in major cities), they’re almost always packed. They stock the counter with two employees throughout most of the day—and still have a line. They’re right off Highway 65, which is a connector freeway between CA70 and I-80. Nonetheless, they manage to keep the restrooms clean. Much cleaner than many of the smaller and similar sized gas stations I’ve seen do. I was literally shocked walking in…I’ve been to the station before but never had to use the restroom, so I never noticed (gotta buy gas, silly!).

So this is my first-ever four-roll review. You might be asking yourself “Why would a plain gas station bathroom get the first 4-roll review? That’s just silly…” Fair question, I suppose…and of course I’m going to answer it. Like I said earlier…this should be what other gas stations aspire to. In any public place, you have to work hard to keep the restrooms looking nice, even harder at gas stations and fast food places because you tend to invite a greater range of people, including those who care less about what they do behind closed (and locked) doors. The nearly complete lack of grafiti (there were some words scratched on the mirror) and the overall cleanliness of the bathroom means the hard-working people at Chevron at Twelve Bridges Lincoln deserve four rolls.

Rating: