If you have ever packed a family of five’s belongings into a minivan before a two-week road trip, you will know what I’m talking about. After our fabricators spend months building an exhibit, they have to break it down into small chunks and pack it on a semi. But none of the chunks are the same size, they have strange centers of gravity, and they’re rather awkward. Sometimes we have twelve-foot long tree trunks weighing 500 pounds. Everything is swathed in foam and shrink-wrap with straps and blankets like we’re moving house. Another similarity to moving is that it all has to fit through a standard door at the final destination – maybe a double door if we’re lucky.

This photo is from the Visitor Center at Sinnemahoning State Park in Pennsylvania. Everything you see in it fit into one of three 26’ long box trucks. 

The install team couldn’t use semis because the roads were too twisty and the site couldn’t handle them. So they drove there in one (very long) day from Rantoul and arrived in a mid-March blizzard. The drivers hadn’t been to the site before, and the turnoff was hard to see in good weather. Cell phone service was nonexistent. So our project manager had to drive around a mountain and locate the trucks that couldn’t find the site in whiteout conditions.

Fortunately, shipping is rarely that difficult. After our loading crew has played Tetris with chunks of groundform, casework, graphics, tree branches, figures, and animal models on our dock, we seal up the trailer and hope for the best. We have had some surprises when the install crew opened the trailer at the destination, but nothing we couldn’t fix. Since we don’t have our own fleet, we hire drivers to get our exhibits to where they need to go. It’s all very anonymous, so you may have passed one of our exhibits on the highway and never known. When we send our steel mammoth up to Wisconsin on its own double dropdeck flatbed, maybe we should put our name on it?

Unloading a truck is the adventure, since every site is different, with its own limitations and challenges. Since we often work with nature centers, we end up installing in the “off-season” so that we don’t affect visitation. That means a bit of rain and some cold temperatures. We have projects in interior Alaska and northern Saskatchewan in the pipeline, so our experience installing multiple exhibits in North Dakota will come in handy there.

I’ve only touched on a few of the issues that shipping exhibits involves, but I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. Just leave them in the comments!