While Davidson and Randolph Counties looks to be conventional, Thomasville is using a Motorola Type II Smartnet 800mhz trunked system. Also, if you are trying to listen to EMS a lot of ambulance to hospital traffic is probably going to be on the Viper channels. Finally, most counties are slowly moving to Viper or their own trunked system, and the majority of emergency comms during disasters, like Florence or Michael are on Viper. So if you buy a conventional scanner it may soon be out of date and/or you'll be missing a lot of comms.
There are a number of older 800 mhz trunking scanners available used on eBay or new from Amazon or specialty stores. You don't need the newest and best, I think you'd be a lot happier investing a little more to buy one of them.