Ultra-Fab (tongue jack) Customer Service for the Win!!

Camper Upgrades

 

Ultra-Fab Phoenix 5500 installed in the summer of 2020.

This is story about excellent customer service.

I spent the last 18 years of my career working with companies to improve their customer satisfaction. The biggest problem I faced was the fact that most companies do not truly believe that outstanding customer service builds consumer loyalty and retains their current customers. Nor do they truly believe outstanding customer service attracts new customers.

Most companies pay lip service to customer service and simply pretend they take care of their customers. I know this for a fact. I spent 18 years working to convince companies that great customer service is the road to success and company growth. Too many companies just don’t get it.

Ultra-Fab gets it!!

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ProPride Hitch 25,000 Mile Update and Maintenance Tips

Camper Upgrades

Gosh, how time flies. We’ve had our ProPride Hitch for 11 years and it is the best investment we have made for towing. The best being defined as safety and convenience. 

On our last camping trip we past the 25,000 mile mark with our ProPride trailer hitch. 

For a detailed explanation of how this hitch works, see my ProPride 20,000 Mile Update post back in 2021.

You might observe that in three years we have only towed 5,000 miles. It doesn’t seem like much, but most of our trips are around 300 miles round trip. Given that we camp a minimum of 2 weeks, and usually camp for a month at a time, we are averaging 3 months of camping per year since we retired. 

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The Weatherman vs. Fall Camping (part 2)

Camping,

After two weeks in the Sequoia National Forest we packed up for the second leg of our month of camping.

We still had over 50 gallons of fresh water on board. After hooking up the trailer to our truck, we drove a short distance to a water spigot in the campground and topped off the fresh water tanks. To off-load our black and gray water holding tanks, we had to drive about 30 miles to a dump station in the town of Isabella. We also stopped at a super market to get some fresh vegetables and other food items. A final stop, at a gas station to fill up the Ford F-250 and one of our propane tanks, completed our pre-trip tasks.

Destination: the Mojave Desert about 300 miles southeast of our first campsite.

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The Weatherman vs. Fall Camping (part 1)

Camping

We enjoy camping in the fall better than any other season, with the exception of those desert wildflower “super bloom” spring-time years. We especially like to camp in the fall in areas that are popular in summer, but usually mostly empty in the fall. After Labor Day the crowds in these areas mostly disappear and the weather is still nice.

We left home a couple weeks after Labor Day and headed to the lower elevations of the Southern Sierra Nevada in the Sequoia National Forest. There is a US Forest Service campground we like that sees few people this time of year. The campground is in a transition zone where high desert meets fir and pine trees.

The weatherman forecasted daytime highs in the low 80° F range and declining into the lower 70s in his 10-day forecast.

He was wrong.

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Book Review: Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey

Backpacking

This is the final book review of a series of three books that influenced me to venture in to deserts. The result of my first forays into desert environs has been a 50+ year love affair in these seemingly stark and inhospitable wastelands, which they are not at all. Not only are deserts my favorite places to hike, camp and backpack; I have lived in the Lower Colorado Desert since 1977.

The two previous “desert” book reviews can be found here:

Book Review: The Thousand Mile Summer, by Colin Fletcher

Book Review: The Man Who Walked Through Time, by Colin Fletcher

Desert Solitaire is a much different work than the two books of Colin Fletcher’s I just reviewed the past couple of days. Fletcher’s are woven around two long-distance hikes. The hikes set a structure for his prose, but in the end, he has to finish the walks. A multi-week or multi-month walk injects a schedule, or maybe better put, a focus on completing the trip itself where observations of nature must, at times, become secondary. Many of Fletcher’s books were about how to survive in the wilderness; Abbey’s is more about how to help nature and wilderness survive mankind.

Before we delve into Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, there are some comments and perceptions of the man himself we need to address.

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