Worst school trip experiences

[crimesagainstwine]

What was your or your DC's worst school trip/foreign exchange/day-out?

For me it was Year 6 (though think we were then "first years" at secondary school) - week long trip to France (Brittany).

I was known to be a reasonable and strong swimmer and when other kids swam out and got in difficulty (nothing too serious thankfully) was told by teachers (the mid-eighties here) to "go and get them as you can swim".

Said teachers stood on shore whilst this 11 year old swam out in fairly choppy seas to tell other kids to come back to shore! The tide was treacherous and I was absolutely terrified the whole time. Thankfully we all got back ashore safely but no thanks from teachers - instead told that I had "taken my time" WTF??

DD1 went on exchange trip to city (foreign exchange) and at the last minute the original host company had collapsed. So new city and hosts chosen. They had a week with the "host" family in their house with her three mates.

It was so obvious hosts were in it for the money and had no interest in the students (aged 13) - two had a bed and two were on the floor.

They were given same food each day (cheese sandwich for lunch and cheap pizza for dinner) - no breakfast and then locked (literally with key) in room from 6pm til 8am each day. She was "lucky" in that only one out of the 4 who could speak the language - the others were absolutely terrified.

They were told to hand in mobiles each night and if wanted to use the loo had to knock on the door. Still makes me absolutely frigging furious this one!

Camping trip with Guides when I was 11 in the 1970s. Leader told me not to take my airbed as the other girls didn't have them so we literally slept on the ground. Toilet tent some distance away through a patch of stinging nettles. We were put in groups to cook our own food on camp fires some days - had to collect our own firewood and one day couldn't find any so pulled branches off trees which wouldn't burn. We travelled around in cars for trips- insufficient seats so once I had to sit on the lap of whoever was in the front passenger seat and remember we didn't use the seatbelt which worried me a lot as my parents always insisted on them (though no rear seat belts in those days). Camp was for something like 12 days - I thought it would never end.

@Donra

My primary school had a 1 week trip for the Y6 leavers in their last spring at the school. Everyone knew for years that their turn was coming and we were super excited. When it was our turn it snowed and the trip was cancelled the day before we were due to depart. Not rescheduled, not replaced with something else - just cancelled. We had to go to school and have normal lessons that week. Gutted doesn’t even come close. As an adult I think it’s shocking they didn’t arrange an alternative.

You've basically described all of the residential trips cancelled in covid. They weren't rearranged either.

Most boring - trip to the Mechanical Doll museum
in Chichester.
Most traumatising - trip to a battery farm in year 6. Skinny and depressed looking chickens missing feathers, some with only one eye, people in tears etc. On a good note, I didn’t know much about battery farming before (this was the 90s) and I made my parents promise never to buy battery eggs from then on!
But we also had brilliant trips to Florida, Bayeux, to Cornwall on hockey tour and to Marwell Zoo. Definitely had more good ones than bad ones.

Getting lost on my DofE expedition. Horribly horribly lost. This was before mobile phones. We eventually found a house and they let us call one of our parents for help. We didn’t have any way of contacting our teachers who were supervising.
It was dark raining and horrible.

There was one school trip where a pupil started making out with the ski instructor (from an external company) on the coach on the way there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The teacher in charge had a complete nightmare to deal with. The pupils parents seemed to know they had been having a relationship (they knew each other from previous ski trips) and didn’t care. For some reason the company didn’t seem to be able to supply another instructor so the teacher spent the week trying to keep the pupil and instructor apart and keeping a close eye on them.

The next year the school, unsurprisingly, changed companies. The new company weren’t great and half the pupils decided they hated skiing and refused to do it. The poor teacher decided she wasn’t running the trip ever again.

This was early 2000s.

School trip to France on Bastille Day. Absolutely nothing was open. We just wondered around in small groups until it was time to go home.

The things we were allowed to do on trips was amazing now I think back. Go to France for the day, they’d just drop us in Dieppe or wherever and we’d be off chatting up French boys, going to cafes and trying to order booze, boys buying knives and firecrackers. Amazing.

A couple of years ago, we decided a good launch to our new topic in September would be to go to a local cinema and watch the Rotten Romans Horrible Histories film which the cinema were putting on especially for us. It was only the third day of term, so we didn't really know these children well yet.

We walked, 2.5 miles along the cliff top - the weather was lovely, but it was a long way with a bunch of eight-year-olds. There was much complaining. I was at the very back, and everytime the teacher at the front stopped to let everyone catch up, I'd send a group of kids from the back of my line to the front of our class, and then over the next 5/10 minutes they'd slowly drop to the back again.

We eventually arrived at the cinema, were shown into our screen, and waited... and waited... and waited... they didn't seem to be able to get the film to start. The cinema staff appologised and kept on trying, and in the meantime brought all the adults free hot drinks and gave us two massive boxes of popcorn and a load of tiny sample cups to give the kids a little bit of popcorn each. I remember kneeling on the floor outside the screen scooping popcorn into sample cups and loading them onto booster seats (the only thing I could find to use as a tray) whilst other teachers and TAs took the booster seats around to give out the popcorn.

In the end, it turned out for whater reason, they couldn't show our film. Cue lots more appologising, a full refund, and them putting on the Lion King for free. The kids had been sat in the cinema for probably about 45 minutes by this point.

I ended up sat just outside the screen with a child who was sobbing because she'd "never seen a PG before". Children regularly came out to go to the toilet, and I'd direct them and then wait for them to come back (I could see both male and female toilets and the door into the screen from where I was sat). Halfway through the film a girl came out, said, "Miss GoodLookingGuy, I need the toilet!" and then wet herself right there in the corridor. We hadn't brought any spare clothes with us (not thinking we'd need them on an indoor trip with KS2) so one of the teachers had to go over to Primark and buy some spare underwear and socks.

Because the Lion King was longer than the film we were supposed to see, and had started later, it was still going when members of the public started arriving and trying to get into the screen for a 12 o'clock showing of the Lion King. So I ended up stood outside the screen door like a bouncer trying to explain that they couldn't go in because there was a school in there, and yes, I knew the Lion King was supposed to start at 12, and no, I didn't work there, and yes, they needed to go back to the front desk and ask.

After a picnic lunch (where children kept trying to feed the seagulls and then ran away screaming when they flocked around them), we set off on our 2.5 mile walk back to school. One of the teachers was 8.5 months pregnant (she'd come down in the minibus with a child we couldn't be sure wouldn't run off, but wanted to walk back and send someone else back in the bus) and we were all worried she was going to go into labour on the clifftop.

And then, finally, when we got back to school, we were later than we had anticipated, and five minutes late for the start of golden time. Cue one child sobbing for the rest of the afternoon because we only had twenty-five minutes golden time, rather than thirty!

When I was at primary school in the Far East, the bus taking us to the annual swimming gala got caught in rising floodwaters. Most of the kids were rescued by police and fire services in boats, but the last few and the driver had to be winched off the roof by helicopter.

That was nothing though, compared to my boarding school's pilgrimage to Bethlehem in 1987, which meant we were in Israel for the very start of the First Intifada. The bus got pelted with rocks and molotov cocktails in Jerusalem before we abandoned the trip. Security at Ben-Gurion airport is out of this world at the best of times, but I've never been so happy to be waiting on standby surrounded by so many uniforms and automatic weapons. I was 12.

My PFB is going on a residential next week.

Maybe this isn't the right thread for me

FWIW the residentials I went on in late 80's / early 90's were fabulous. Lots of day trips, beautiful parts of the country etc. Only negative thing was being on a minibus with a boy who was horrifically travel sick opposite me and thay triggering my lifelong emetophobia.

another trip to Sellafield in the 80's.
Awful journey there as the coach driver got lost and we were driving for what seemed like hours around right country lanes unsuited to a bus. I had the worst travel sickness and threw up everywhere, used my friends entire pack of wet wipes!
And the teachers just left me to it, didn't ask if I was ok

@Otherpeoplesteens I think having your bus pelted with Molotov cocktails wins the thread 😲

DD's was a trip to Stonehenge....as it was on the route to her dad's, she had been passed it EOW for 5 years and couldn't have been less excited about visiting it if she tried.

Mine was a trip to the local sewage plant, which resulted in a whole class detention when we got back due to the amount of times the word "shit" was used on the coach going back to school

Generally speaking, I loved school trips, but an A-level English trip to the Barbican theatre to see the Shakespeare play we were studying sticks in my mind. Seeing it live was supposed to give us an understanding, you see.

We were sitting as far away from the stage as possible, with pillars blocking the view to boot.

We were also studying ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. We had a trip planned to see it actually performed at Canterbury Cathedral. I refused to go. At 17 I could see the likelihood of being seated far away from the action with the view obscured by pillars was greater in the nave than in a theatre.

The teacher said I was ruining my chances of doing well in my exam by not going.

Reader, I am deaf. Literally stone deaf. I was mainstreamed and she had no clue that I couldn’t understand the play from a long way away with a limited view unable to hear it or get close enough to lipread any of the dialogue, even though in class I had to have help. It was a monumental waste of time and I was cutting my losses and saving my parents’ hard-earned money by not going on any more of these trips.

That threat by the teacher still sticks in my mind. I got top marks in my English A-level and a Distinction in the then Special Paper in English - and went on to do a Master’s in Old English.

School trip to Germany in the early 90s.
On the ferry I spent all my weeks spending money on a necklace that broke after about ten minutes then I spent the rest of the journey starving as my 'friends' tucked into food in the restaurant as I looked on feeling faint.
We stopped at a service station on the way to our accommodation where all the boys (we were 13) bought porn mags and edible crotchless knickers and we're throwing them around the bus.
At the hostel I was put in a room with a girl who stank and left skid-marked knickers on the radiator.

Were

Another 90s French trip with drunk teachers!

We were 14, in year 9, and during an evening visit to Monmatre (where the teachers were busy getting pissed) a couple of the racier girls went off with a couple of French lads. When it came time to meet back up for the coach to go back to our hostel, they were nowhere to be seen. It was about 9pm and getting dark.

Much panic from the teachers while we were like “oh it’s just Anna and Jane, this is the kind of thing they do all the time”. We were supremely unbothered but even our negligent drunk teachers seemed to understand that losing a couple of 14yr olds who were probably off getting pregnant with little French babies even as we waited for them was a bit of a safeguarding issue. One of the missing girls had a pager (most 90s thing ever) so one of the teachers got her pager number off of one of us and traipsed off to a pay phone to leave her what I assume were a series of angry messages asking her to phone the call box number.

Meanwhile the rest of us waited - I’ve got lots of photos of us sat on those steps outside Monmatre drinking cans of Coke and wearing our souvenir shit baseball caps we had brought from the Looky-Looky sellers. Night fell over Paris and the teachers made the decision to phone the police. Swiftly a load of police- like scores- turned up, with a few armed gendarme for good measure. I don’t know what they thought was going on, but they seemed to interpret “two missing 14yr olds on a school trip from London” as an international terrorist threat. The one teacher who spoke decent French talked to them and they insisted on interviewing the missing girls closest friends, with the teacher as a translator, seemingly believe that this was some big plan they’d cooked up together for nefarious reasons unexplained.

The police lost interest when they realised that it was what it was explained to be- a couple of missing Cockney teenagers- and told us just to wait, leaving us with a phone number to ring in case they didn’t turn up by the morning.

It was decided then that the teachers should go and look for the girls in pairs. Whether or not this was a ploy for them to go and look for them in the finest drinking spots of Paris and have another wine or six, I don’t know, but they left the rest of us- like, 100 of us!- with our Head of Year and one other teacher. We were seriously over it by now, hungry and fed up. One of the remaining teachers went off to a nearby shop and brought us some bread and cheese and salami and stuff so we ate that in a kind of mass late-night picnic.

At about midnight, one of the crack squad of pairs of teachers reappeared, dragging behind them the clearly very drunk Anna and Jane who they’d found with the boys they went off with in a nearby discotheque. We then had to wait for all the other teachers to come back- this was pre mobiles but would have been so much less of a saga had it been a few years later! Eventually they did and by 1am we were back on the coach. You could have cut the tension with a knife, I don’t know who hated Anna and Jane more, us or the teachers (not that they gave a shit, they were wankered).

The next morning we were due to go to Versailles. Anna and Jane had spent the night asleep with teachers sat outside their room lest they try and escape. We all went to breakfast but they weren’t there, rumours swirled that they’d run away again, had been sent home, the works. We all piled on the coach and about 8.30am a clearly very hungover Anna and Jane appeared. They were frogmarched to the front of the coach and made to apologise (on the coach mic!) to us, to the teachers and to Terry the driver who’d been sat waiting with us for hours. You’ve never heard a more sad pair of hungover teenagers than these two sounded that morning. The greatest punishment of all of course was that they had to traipse around Versailles feeling like a pig shat in their heads.

It’s been 25yrs and the story is still told amongst us that were there to great amusement- Anna and Jane themselves are 40-odd-years old but get ribbed about it on Facebook whenever pictures from that trip are shared.

I went on a field trip to an adventure centre and suffered quite a severe asthma attack that lasted a couple of days. I was only about ten, and I was just left at the dormitory wheezing all day on my own and told to stay in bed and rest. It was before I was issued with any inhalers. I can't believe they left me to it!

DD went camping with Cubs when she was 9.
She didn't have a sleeping bag and they said she kept crying all night. This was 4 years ago.

She was too scared to tell them she didn't have a sleeping bag (she didn't know where it had been put on arrival) and none of the idiot grown ups in charge thought to check. They just told her to go back to her tent and called me in the morning to pick her up. They never responded to my complaint either. Piss poor safeguarding from Cubs. It was a shit camp too, my dc's do more playing out in the street and park.

She was so cold and quiet all weekend after that, it broke my heart. She left cubs shortly afterwards.

I must be very fortunate because I don't remember any really dire ones. The worst was a trip to ASDA bakery for food tech, to watch them make bread. The guy giving the demonstration had a cold and kept wiping his nose on the back of his hand while he was kneading the dough. It made me feel so sick! I didn't eat ASDA bread for many years after that!

On a school trip to North Wales, a teacher walked us up one of the tallest local hills. The weather was awful and getting worse and worse - at one point we were more or less grabbing onto grass to keep going uphill and cloud and fog were coming it, and the teacher realised we were lost. We turned around and luckily we found our route and got back to the coach eventually. It could have got a lot more wrong, so we were quite lucky!

BurnDownTheDiscoHangTheDJ Beautifully put, that story is gold!

I went on a French exchange, my exchange partner and her parents were lovely but there's no way her little brother isn't a serial killer by now. At one point he put his hands over his mothers eyes while she was driving down the motorway at high speed. Genuinely thought I was going to die.
My best friend had is worse. She was an atheist vegetarian who had to spend hours in church and was presented with a whole cows tongue for dinner.

A week long residential locally, aged 10, when half the pupils came down with some sort of sickness bug/food poisoning; it was literally everywhere and we were made to clean up our own vomit whilst still vomiting. Parents came to visit mid-week and we were told under no circumstances were we to say we wanted to go home - plenty of people did and I so wished I hadn't tried to be brave by sticking it out.

Trip to France when I was 12 - communal showers that no-one wanted to use and the girls who had their period were allowed to take turns for a "private wash" in the teacher's room.

Another trip to France at 15 when every meat dish was so undercooked I told them I was a vegetarian. Only alternative on offer was a "tomato salad" that turned out to be a plate of tomatoes swimming in oil and garlic and I hated tomatoes.

A huge music convention at the NEC arena in Birmingham as part of our music GCSE trip in the mid 2000’s. It was huge, we didn’t have to wear uniform and we weren’t supervised we just had free reign for the day and had to meet back to the coach at the end of the day.
There was a full blown mosh-pit, tons of food trucks, goodie bags full of free stuff. We all drank pints of beer as no one asked for ID and everyone around us was smoking weed so strong that we all ended up with our eyes watering and stinking of it. I went for 2/3 years in a row I loved it

Obviously to clarify it was a ‘worst school trip’ because I can’t imagine it being allowed at all now in terms of safeguarding etc but it wasn’t that long ago! We were surprised at the time as the staff had full knowledge of what we were doing but just deliberately turned a blind eye to it all as they were doing the same! Lol