Romeo's is moving!

Please try to be calm, but Romeo's Downtown Pipe & Tobacco Co. is leaving downtown Rogers. After more than two years, the shop has outgrown its original location, and circumstances have made this the time to find new digs.
The new shop will be at 220C N. Walton Blvd. in Bentonville, sharing a building with Radio Shack, across the street from O'Reilly's.
The new location gives Romeo's more space, and renovations are already underway to make the new shop as enjoyable for an afternoon smoke as the old shop was.
The big move is scheduled for Monday, with the new shop opening Tuesday, March 8.
It's the beginning of a new era for Frank and his little smoke shop and the following they have found in northwest Arkansas. Frank has big ideas for his new shop, and, as the consummate storyteller,
Oh, and there's one more thing. Romeo's is no longer in downtown, so Romeo's is getting a new name. Starting Tuesday, it will be Romeo's Uptown Pipes & Cigars.
Hope to see you all there.

Smoking and sharing

The table in the middle of the small smoking room seems to fill faster than the seats around it, full of tins and bags and pipes and lighters. Invariably on the second and fifth Thursday of each month, I occupy one of the seats around the table. When the other seats fill up, the pipe club meeting begins.

Experiences may vary from club to club, and I can speak only to mine (The Ozark Pipe Smokers), but the spirit of camaraderie quickly takes over as tobaccos get passed around, some brought specifically by request or with a particular taster in mind, others simply because the group will enjoy them. Thanks to such meetings, I had my first taste of too many tobaccos to count, but I'll try to name a few: Peter Stokkebye's Luxury Navy Flake, Frog Morton on the Town, McClelland Christmas Cheer (I think it was 2006), home-blended aromatics, Gawith's Brown No. 4.

Such gatherings are a social setting designed to allow members and guests to share their own pipe smoking experience with others. They are essentially an expansion of the front porch days of long ago, where men sat and smoked and shot the breeze. It is a healthy interaction that has become increasingly rare in modern society, and what are pipe smokers if not nostalgic to some degree for those things disappearing from the past.