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!

My favourite awful school trip story ever didn't actually happen to me, but it has passed into legend.

Yr12 geography field trip to the Lake District, staying in a youth hostel, so fairly basic. The boys showers were totally open, no cubicles, no lockers, just a row of benches and facing them, a row of showers. There was a kind of discreet silent mutual agreement between all of the boys that they'd just look directly ahead.

The geography teacher on the trip felt differently. As all of the boys carefully draped their towels directly behind them, coyly cupping their privates before crablike shuffing to the showers, he marched in, towel around his waist, whipped it off, announced 'we've all got one, boys!' and then had a long shower surrounded by cringing 17yos trying really, REALLY hard not to accidentally see Mr F's bollocks swinging away as he soaped his armpits.

'we've all got one, boys!' is now shorthand in this house for times when the DC want me to shut up.

Not nearly as exciting as some of the other France school trips, just the standard... pissed teachers, vomiting kids, blood all over the mattresses, one kid getting attacked by a bull who was kept in the field beside the 'chateau' in which we stayed, the more attractive animatrice snogging one of the students, the less attractive animatrice getting relentlessly teased by the students...
I used my spending money on a 2 kg tub of Haribo at the Carrefour, so the trip was a success from my point of view.

I went on a small group mixed year activity trip for 5 days. My brother was on it too. I was 12, his 14. He acted as he always did at home - bullying me verbally, and punching me. My 12yo friend hadn’t witnessed anything but love in her home… so she went to a teacher, crying her eyes out, explaining that I’d just been kicked, punched in the stomach, shoved and slapped hard across the back of the head. The teacher told her that they wouldn’t get involved in a fight “between” siblings.
She was horrified.
No teacher came to check on me.

@Nat6999

Guide camp when I was 10, had never been away from home before, the tents were awful. I was really homesick, parents were able to visit at the weekend & I never stopped crying all the time my parents were there & begged them to take me home. The guide leader refused to allow them to take me home, said I was attention seeking & was just a mardy child. I had an awful time & just wanted to go home, the weather was awful, it never stopped raining, everything including our sleeping bags was wet through, it was cold during the day & even colder at night. I have never been camping since & would never go again. I packed guides in as soon as we came back.

That is awful! DW and I used to run a cub pack. If one of ours was that homesick, we'd take him home if his parents couldn't get to the campsite.

I went to very small and remote rural primary .
Our trips were all agricultural based and seemed to often benefit farmers. Potato picking, lambing , working in a shearing shed. Most memorable, an abattoir to watch pigs being slaughtered.
As a teen, I boarded and most trips were ghastly extreme outdoor "adventures" . Caving, where one international student drowned. Ski trips in blizzards. Bizarre solo bush camps and 100km hikes in rain and mud.
I just could not wait to live in a city and never have to toilet in a hole, be wet and blistered or sleep in a tent again.

To the local Safeway supermarket to see how they operated the fresh produce counters. It was dull but we were glad to be out!

sadeyedlady

Church youth camp in Bavaria, WW2 tent. No ground sheet or mat, Roughly dug cess pit, loo paper on nail in plank, so I actually avoided it and did things like wee in the lake instead. Got lost on the orienteering and was two hours late back but nobody cared. Then my tent partner decided to come out as a lesbian and suggested we snog (I am not a lesbian and even if I was she would not have been on my list as she was ugly and really weird). I just zipped up my sleeping bag very firmly and turned my back). Camping PTSD and I have never camped again.

This got my husband and I talking today about school trips and how enormously fun they were and how absolutely minimal supervision was. He also remembers being basically dropped off in a German town and left to get on with it for the day.
We wondered if it was because now we see 13/14 year olds as still pretty young children but my parents were both at work by 14 and so probably most of the teachers in the 1990s had experience of being an “adult” since they were in their mid teens so didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with trusting a load of 13/14 year olds in a random town for a period of time.
How wrong they were! Whatever we could get up to, we did! They were brilliant fun though, I adored school trips.

For me it was any trip with a bike riding component - usually not explicit but it was assumed that every child could ride a bike - I could not ride a bike (learnt as an adult).

So I would get given a bike invariably too big for me as if by magic I would instantly learn to ride it in front of my peers who would see my flailing and frustration as comedy. It seemed that adults in the 80's thought 'Cannot ride a bike = can ride but not very well just is a bit shy'.

So I would be lumbered with a bike that was worse than useless and be at the back of the pack just wanting to go home when I would have been fine without a bike to lug around.

Trip to Estonia around 1998, I was 16

I stayed with a girl and her grandma. Grandma spoke no English and had two pots on the stove constantly, one of porridge and one of some sort of stew. They were just topped up and sat simmering away. There were no flushing toilets, literally a hole in the ground, and the shower was in a block outside for all the flats in this development.

The odd place that had indoor toilets, they didn’t flush and stank, think department store toilets that were like open portaloos

I went out with the girl and her friend, with her friend driving and it was the most terrifying experience of my life. She kept missing the gears, leading her to shout various variations of the F Word

It was an experience

I don't think I can say any really bad ones for me, but a friend of mine was a host on an exchange and they were just unpacking and chatting to their visitor when her (the English side) teacher appeared, looking rather grey, and whisked the other child off not to be seen again.
Turned out the other child's mum had been in a rti on the way back from dropping them at the airport and had been killed outright.

My dsis was on a school trip where one boys' dorm was woken by a stranger who told them he was a doctor who proceeded to touch them in various places. There was another school staying there too that also had a boys' dorm assaulted by the same person.
When I went on the same trip a few years later the teachers went round at night to check we'd all locked the doors.

We had to go rafting in a river knowing there were some dead bodies in it. A bus had crashed into the river and not all the bodies had been found. Luckily, we didn’t come across one of them but all their various belongings were floating in the river and it was petrifying. Some people rafting the next week found the body of a baby.

I had good experiences of all the school trips I went on. However, as a wheelchair user, there were some trips the school refused to take me on. I don't think that would happen now.

School trip to Germany in 1990.
I was 14. Mostly 14 to 17 year olds.
Lots of alcohol on bus and kids drunk and being sick.
I got put in a room with 2 other girls who did the 2s company 3s a crowd thing.
Was horrible.
By day 2 1 girl had proper flu.
I came down with it on the 26hr bus journey home.

Falling on the stairs at Kings Cross and taking a chunk of skin off of my arm aged about 11. I was so shy and too embarrassed to say I was hurt so I just laughed off the jeering, tugged my sleeve over it and tried not to cry! Ended up having to peel my jumper off when I got home because it had stuck. In hindsight it was a miracle it didn't get infected!

Late 90s, residential geography trip to the Gower while I was teacher training.

First we were delayed because the 2 lecturers driving hadn't put petrol in the mini buses in advance. They had to wait for somoene to arrive with fuel cards for them to use and we were late leaving.

Our minibus lost sight of their bus behind us on the motorway. It was pre mobile phone days so no easy way to check up on what was going on. Turns out they had a flat and we had to wait for them to be sorted out and catch us up.

Next morning they dropped us off at the nearby village to do a survey and the lecturers went off to get a new tyre for the bus. They got lost and we were there hours and hours longer than we should have been and nearly missed dinner.

The next day, we went for a walk on the salt marshes where I turned my ankle, breaking it in the process. Had to walk 2 miles back to the bus. I was taken by the female lecturer to the hospital, to be told she had the wrong one and there were no xrays there. When I got to the right one, thankfully with a friend who had come along to keep me sane, it was put in plaster and we were given a lift back to the uni campus where we were staying. I was exhausted and in pain but the lecturer pulled the mini bus over repeatedly and tried to get me to leave the bus to admire the rocks and the scenery until my friend reminded her I probably was in pain and we wanted to get back for dinner as it was getting late.

It was only 6 weeks before I was due to get married and although I was out of the plaster cast, I was supposed to still be on crutches for the big day. I wrapped them in lace, but then forgot them and did without in the chaos.

@buckleten

I went on a day trip to France in my first year of secondary school, in the 80's. All the boys bought flick knives (!) from street sellers and were messing about with them on the bus, then the weather was so rough on the ferry back that everyone was sick all over the place, on the seats, floors,everywhere!

Ha! We went on trip to France in 4th year in the 1980s. All the boys bought flick knives there too!! Everyone was sick, mostly because of Belgian beer, the teachers got pissed so everyone was free to go on rampages and there were a couple of big fights between our school and other visiting schools - not them against us, just a general case of lots unsupervised British 15 and 16 year olds let loose abroad where they could buy and drink lager in public. Then the hotel fed us horse meat. Then we stopped at Alton Towers on the way home which I think was the norm for Scottish bus trips abroad way back then!

We've had a few moments as staff members too.

The more memorable being...

The whole school being evacuated from the theatre to stand on Rhyl seafront when the fire alarm went off, in December, shivering as it's very windy there.

Waiting for my class's bus when we were all on our way back from an eisteddfod trip in the v late 90s, to find it was because our bus driver had got a fish bone stuck in his throat while eating his lunch and had to go to A&E.

And there are a few that nearly didn't (or actually didn't) leave in the first place.

The time the whole school was waiting for buses to take us to the panto, only to find later that the bus company had been sold on and hadn't passed on the bookings to the new company, and we hadn't been told.

As well as the time that I was waiting with my yeargroup to leave for a residential, with all parents waiting to wave their children off, only for the bus company to send a bus that was too small to fit the number of children we'd booked it for. Didn't send a message of confidence to the waiting parents that the whole trip was in hand.

On the same trip, on the last day a child felt ill and was being sick, only wanting to get home as quickly as possible, but the setup is that part of the trip is to go to the Big Pit on the way home. A staff member sat with the poorly child to look after her, but it played merry hell with the supervision ratios and the children nearly missed their chance to go down the mine itself.

Oh - and not my trip, but hugely outing to any staff who recognise the story...

We used to run a foreign skiing trip residential. Despite having really clear guidelines and info sheets for parents about dos and don't for the trip, many meetings with parents and it being common knowledge what you can and cannot fly with, we had a problem.

When the lead member of staff was just about to take the group through security she asked them to double check whether any of them had anything they couldn't take through security - thinking liquids etc - when a pair of twins said, "You mean, like bullets?" and whipped actual ammunition out of their pencil case in their bags.

This thread makes me want to NEVER send my kids on a school trip!

School trip to Stratford on Avon to see a play. Uneventful until we got back on the coach, when it set off, I realised we were swaying about across the road. I remember a teacher basically grabbed the wheel and steered . It emerged the driver had been drinking all day. We ended up sleeping in the coach until a replacement driver arrived next morning, think I finally got home around 11.
At the time it seemed an adventure, looking back now, I can see how dangerous it was.

Foreign exchange.
The family didn't feed me other than breakfast and 1 tiny bit of baguette for lunch for the trips out.
No dinner.
I remember writing mum a postcard telling her to call the school to get hold of the teacher as i was too scared to tell them. It took a few days and luckily i had extra money to what i wad allowed and got crisps etc on excursions.

The day the teachers found out they took me and my friend to mac d.

I hated it i still think about it now.

Girl guide trip to the country
We stayed in a cottage that was grey-everything was grey-and that was the highlight of the trip
I’ve never been so bored in my life-there was nothing to do

Last year of primary we went to Robin hoods bay for a week
I remember clinging onto the side of a cliff,with no safety equipment at all-just a very long drop into the sea and the ‘floor’ we where walking on was the length of our feet
It’s a bloody miracle nobody fell off

A trip round the bar walls in York-we walked round them and went back to school

A trip to the local newspaper offices
We just stood around doing nothing while the teacher got a lesson in what goes into making news in the area

My dd went on a trip to somewhere that makes jam for fortum and mason
She really thought she was going to have a go herself-nope they had to sit there all day watching a woman making it-they where the allowed to talk all day and she got paired with the class bully
She doesn’t even like jam

Oh and the trip away with the brownies-we where on a coach driving along and as we where about to drive over a bridge the driver stopped to cheerfully show us where the last coach full of brownies had a crash on that bridge (I think they ended up driving off it) and most of the girls sadly died
He jumped back in and drove us over it
I’ve never been so scared of a bridge in my life