What random school trips did you go on?

[DhIsAJudge]

GCSE drama and we were studying a midsummer’s night dream. We trekked over to the Lowry from north wales to watch a performance.

It was so bizarre, it wasn’t in English it was in Sanskrit, Hindi and another language which was fine but it was really hard to follow. It was also set in modern times and there was a massive scaffold on the set.

Then about 45 mins in the smoke alarm went off in the Lowry and the stage filled with smoke and the audience (us included) just stayed in our seats as we all thought it was part of the play until the ushers came round and told everyone to leave as one of the actors behind the scenes had accidentally set fire to a prop.

I genuinely think that if they hadn’t come out to tell us it was on fire we’d have just stayed there and burned to death.

We also went to a sub station and learned about electricity and as we went round the site I saw my dad who forgot we were coming 😂😂 (he was head engineer and he knew he had a school trip but didn’t know it was my school)

Not at school but at uni. We were studying Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the French society arranged a trip to see it live at a local theatre. There was hardly anyone in the audience but after the interval lots of men arrived, many of them eating packed lunches - it soon transpired that there was full frontal nudity in the second half. The ushers said they had a steady stream of men who only came for the second half!

A school trip to France, think we were year 9 and 10. Stayed in some weird hostel where we ate horse meet. Highlight was a visit to the cognac distillery where we got to try the cognac and then went bowling. Boys and girls had to walk at least 3 feet apart at all times due to some late night bed swapping! Was many years ago.

You are old!
Were the French not a bit freaked out by an invasion of English school girls that year?

When my son was ten, he went on a geography class trip on a boat which, it later transpired, was also used for booze cruises. There was a big dispenser of fruit juice that they were all invited to help themselves to. Except it wasnt fruit juice, it was some sort of alcoholic aperitif and half the class came back half cut 😆

We went on a school trip to … Tesco!

School was in a quiet rural area so when a large new Tesco opened nearby it was all very exciting! We had a proper behind the scenes tour and had a go on the tills. This was mid 90s.

That actually does sound good.

DH remembers being taken on numerous "French trips" in the late 80s which, in retrospect, were actually expenses-paid booze cruises for the teachers.

Coach down to Dover
Ferry to Calais
Visit to hypermarché in Calais
Ferry back to Dover
And back they all went up to school again by coach with all the shopping bags.

No actual French cultural experiences or language practice, but lots and lots of bottles of wine for the teachers...

Many, many random trips - I went to school where my father was head and there was no way to get home without him so I went on every trip that he ran. I have many pics of a waving group of year 6s with a small then an increasingly taller me over the years. I could have stepped in for the guide at many London landmarks by the end. This was a very long time ago and I was never aware of it being considered odd at the time - but was, in retrospect.

Yes and no. We went to Flamingo Land, on the same site. Eden Camp hadn't been opened as a tourist attraction.

Typo

Ha, my one and only school trip (deprived childhood!) was also to a working coal mine.

Only the boys were allowed to go down in the lift, us girls had to stay in the office, and we nudged each other to look at the Pirelli calendar on the wall.

Also not school but a summer holiday club thing that my parents signed me up for. We did swimming and other things but on one of the days we went to a bowling alley to see behind the scenes but we didn’t actually get to bowl.

Was that Tim Supple’s Indian Dream? With a long red piece of material hanging from the ceiling that Titania was wrapped in? It was my favourite ever production of MND. I watched it at a schools performance and the children/teens there were spellbound. I’ve never seen children actually laugh at Shakespeare’s jokes before. I still think about it all the time.

Shame about the fire alarm though.

I went on a geography field trip somewhere in the south of England in secondary. Except the minibus broke down on the dual carriageway so we spent several hours waiting for the tow truck. After eating our lunch and chatting for awhile the rain eventually cleared enough for us to hang out in a nearby field for a bit before getting back in the minibus to go home again. Can’t even remember where we were supposed to be going

Another one of childrens...

We got an email at around 2.30pm. "we would like to confirm the School Bus with Yr1 and Yr5 has NOT crashed. Children will be on their normal transport home" No more information.

Turns out there were just aware of the ways of children and wanted to get in there first they had about 2.5hrs in stationary traffic on the motorway after a big crash... and all the children wanted to talk about the crash.

First was a trip to the cinema in our city in 1961 to see St. Francis of Assisi.
We walked in twos to the bus stop, 4 pennies in hand for the fare and supervised by 3 Nuns.
The conductor, obviously a 'good Catholic' told us to keep our money for sweets and paid the fare for us.
The film was a bit long and scary in parts but it was talked about for years to come.
The sweets were
4 Fruit Salad chews ---- 1d
4 Black Jack chews--1d

Licorice comfits 2oz---2d.
They lasted all film.
Well over 60 years ago but the school and cinema are still there.

Us too!! Not rural though, so there were at least 2 schools that did this.

It was brilliant, we got to see the jam being injected into the doughnuts. Top memory of the trip. We also got to do taste tests on yoghurts.

In primary school we went on a trip to see the new pedestrian crossing that had been installed on the High Street, and learn how to use it. We took it in turns, in small groups, to cross the road - at the time it seemed quite exciting.

Moscow and Leningrad pre Perestroika. Co-Ed group of 14 & 15 yr olds. It was amazing in many ways including the complete absence of teacher supervision which enabled 3 of us to get completely lost in Moscow for about 5 hours. No one noticed until we returned in tears, pathetically grateful to have found the hotel at about 8pm.

Me too! Although I was a little bit older as already at sixth form but invited back as there was space. Moscow was amazing and seemed so safe - so many kids wandering about on their own. And we got the train to Leningrad which was so cheap that our teacher paid for lunch for all of us in the buffet car. The food was pretty bad everywhere though...

I did a week long residential learning about and re-enacting the French Revolution at a local castle

The train to Leningrad was a highlight. We got a sleeper and in my memory it was all wood panel and Agatha Christie “Murder on the Orient Express” vibes.

I'm another one who went to Camp Eden. Also Wylfa Nuclear Power station. And for Geography, a day of standing on a Snowdonia car park writing down reg plates so we could use last two letters to work out roughly how far the cars had travelled!

I'm pretty sure it rains and blows a bone chilling gale every day at Eden camp. I've done 5 trips there, 1 times as a child, 2 with school as school trips, 1 with my nephews and 1 time with work (worked in museum education). Every time it has rained and blown a gale.

I will not hear a word against Helmshore! I moved away from the area a few years ago and I used to love a trip there.

I work in a school that doesn't have cash for trips and nor do our families. Our SLT encourage a lot of small local trips instead - we go to a lot of local playgrounds.

On one of those, to one about a mile away, we got there to find it was closed and actively being worked on. The teacher who arranged the trip had been assured by the council it would be finished, but hadn't actually checked... We walked 2 classes 2 miles to ultimately sing the wheels on the bus and each choose an interesting looking leaf to carry back to the school. It was a confusing trip even for me and I was staff on it. The older kids were nonplussed. This was the entire trip for that term - a two mile walk to pick up a leaf from near a playground.