Greenheck Trip - Day 2

Woke up at 7:00 this morning because our tour commenced in earnest at 8:00. Today's tour was much like yesterday's. We got to see some of the sound and performance testing chambers. They also have set ups to test fire dampers and hurricane louvers. They do a couple things to test the hurricane louvers. One is a "large missile impact test". They shoot a 2 x 4 at 34 mph out of a compressed air cannon. Unfortunately, the didn't demonstrate that test for us. The other test is a rain penetration test.

It was another cold, dreary, and foggy day. In fact, the fog got thicker and thicker as the day went on. One of the groups had to leave just after lunch to catch their flight back to NC. They learned that their flight was cancelled and the word got back to the rest of us still at the Greenheck factory. Greenheck was great constantly checking on the status of our flight. Even though the fog was so thick, you could hardly see the building across the street, our 5:00 flight wasn't cancelled yet. We still had to go to the airport even if our flight was cancelled so we could reschedule another flight. Before we left, Duke bought everybody something from the Greenheck store. I got a nice polar fleece and I got my son a t-shirt. It had a cartoon character centrifugal rooftop downblast exhaust fan that was saying, "I'm a Greenheck fan! Are you?" They also gave us a jar of Wisconsin maple syrup and a pen and pencil set.

The fog was even worse at the aiport and all of the flights were cancelled. We learned that if we still wanted to fly out of Wausau, the earliest we could leave was the same time tomorrow. The folks at the airport said that the best they could get us was a 10:00 flight out of Minneapolis at 10:00 the next day. So we got ourselves a rental car and drove 3 hours to Minneapolis. We made one early pitstop to get some Mc Donald's because we hadn't eaten dinner yet. Greenheck took care of setting up our hotel there. After some misdirection, we got to the hotel around 9:00. After settling in, we went to the restaurant across the street and had a second dinner and more importantly, beer. Got back to the hotel around 11:00 and immediately went to bed.

Today's events were quite funny because Duke was joking earlier that how something always seems to go wrong when he brings folks from my company. One time, they didn't even leave Richmond due to mechanical problems with the plane. Another time, they flew into Chicago, had a major delay there, and missed the connecting flight. The tours at Greenheck are only on certain days so they just had to fly back to Richmond.