Uncle Sam
Member
The “working vacation” to the mid-west which had been in the planning stage for months, began August 24th with a new Visi-Combo, vendor parts, and luggage loaded into my pickup and ended Sunday, September 3. It takes time to get all the stops organized, the parts ordered and shipped to the right place, and everything organized at the office. Much of the mid-west has been very hot and dry this year, as everybody knows, so we had a very hot time along the way (up to 108 degrees). Our first overnight was in St. George, UT; the next day we visited Zion and Bryce National Parks to see what Mother Nature can create over millions of years. Absolutely spectacular!!!! Then on to Colorado for our first “working time” to repair and do an upgrade on a Visi-Combo refrigerated vendor. This operator bought a used vendor online to install in his wash. You never know what you are going to find when you do upgrades to a used vendor, so it became a challenge to get the job done. (More about this in another post)
The next stop was in Hays, KS with the new Visi-Combo to replace a customer’s machine that was 9 years old. After that was done I loaded the old Visi-Combo trade-in onto my truck and drove east to Windtrax in Mission, KS. The next day I rebuilt and upgraded the trade-in into a medium security ShurVend machine for delivery to a customer in Lawrence, KS. This was done the next day and that concluded the “physical work” part of the trip. The rest of the trip back to the west was observing and looking at washes in many small towns to see how the vending was installed.
My wife and I had never been into the central mid-west before so it was interesting to see this part of our great nation. We started home in a southwesterly direction on state highways through Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and the Texas panhandle to pick up I-40 to Albuquerque. Lots of open, relatively flat country, small towns, and grain storage silos every few miles; some areas looked pretty good, other parts not so good. But no mountains. We are used to seeing the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east every morning, so we always know which direction we are going. No such luck on the mid-west plateau. Since we are used to a desert-type climate at home, much of the mid-west reminds us of certain parts of California.
All in all a very interesting trip with much being learned about what the wash operator needs in the vending area of the wash.
Uncle Sam
The next stop was in Hays, KS with the new Visi-Combo to replace a customer’s machine that was 9 years old. After that was done I loaded the old Visi-Combo trade-in onto my truck and drove east to Windtrax in Mission, KS. The next day I rebuilt and upgraded the trade-in into a medium security ShurVend machine for delivery to a customer in Lawrence, KS. This was done the next day and that concluded the “physical work” part of the trip. The rest of the trip back to the west was observing and looking at washes in many small towns to see how the vending was installed.
My wife and I had never been into the central mid-west before so it was interesting to see this part of our great nation. We started home in a southwesterly direction on state highways through Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and the Texas panhandle to pick up I-40 to Albuquerque. Lots of open, relatively flat country, small towns, and grain storage silos every few miles; some areas looked pretty good, other parts not so good. But no mountains. We are used to seeing the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east every morning, so we always know which direction we are going. No such luck on the mid-west plateau. Since we are used to a desert-type climate at home, much of the mid-west reminds us of certain parts of California.
All in all a very interesting trip with much being learned about what the wash operator needs in the vending area of the wash.
Uncle Sam