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)

First year of secondary school in the 70s. Our male form teacher announced he was arranging an optional free trip to a local forest at half term for anyone interested. Ended up with six 12 year old girls including me with our picnic lunches bundled into his ancient estate car. As far as I recall nothing untoward took place and we spent the day wandering around the forest with him - but on reflection it was all very unorthodox.

My dd was actually in a school coach crash age 7 (low speed, rear window smashed, nobody hurt but very worried parents until we actually saw them). First thing dd said was 'my tooth fell out'. I said 'oh did you bang your mouth when the coach crashed?' 'No, it was at lunchtime'
Second thing was she lost her lolly in the crash.
Loads of kids got taken to hospital to check for whiplash because someone asked if anyone hurt their neck and a load of drama queens said they had, the more who said so, the more others joined in. Not a single case of whiplash actually emerged but they definitely wasted a lot of time at the local A&E that day.

I studied animal care at college and we were taken to an abbatoir.
It was a very surreal day as we were split into two groups, one half got to have fun driving tractors around the car park while the other half went inside and watched a pig and a sheep being slaughtered which was pretty horrific then we swapped over

I think the trip would have been better suited to the agriculture students rather than the animal care lot although one of our classmates came out saying she was no longer vegetarian as it wasn't as bad as she imagined.

I have a vague memory of a trip to Totnes in Devon. We were all given clipboards and had to walk up and down the high street, writing down which businesses were in them, florist, jewellers, newsagent, pub etc, and mapping it all out. Some of the luckier ones got given those wheely measuring stick things.

Colomendy North Wales

We had a headmaster who was very keen on "improvement" so each year (1950s) we were taken to a concert in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. I enjoyed the concert but the part I liked best was that we were expected to make our own way home. So we dodged off early and went around the shops.

In the year Queen Elizabeth II acceded we were taken to see a double bill at the local cinema - the coronation and the conquest of Everest. I enjoyed that.

When I was 14 the school offered my parents a bursury for me to go on the trip to Paris. My father would not sign the consent form. He saw it as charity and said it would give me "unrealistic ideas above my class"

When I was going on 15 there was a day trip to Cortaulds textile factory which was quite interesting. However they were trying to recruit some of the kids to join up as factory hands when they left school. When I told my parents I was not going to work in a factory or a shop they said I was "hoity toity".

We went to the Humber Bridge - got a coach there, walked across it, had lunch and then got the coach back! It was quite windy.

Omg I have so many!

college “get to know you” day.. crawling through a tunnel 12ft underground. No lights, no torches. Nose to arse with someone you met 10minutes ago.

visiting a Stone Age village where we had to camp and dress as if we lived in Stone Age times

as as a student teacher I went with teenage kids to a mock western “theme park” where they made the adults dress as cowboys and “saloon girls” and had weird show down / shoot out with actors.

walk out on the moors with a late 90s version of Bear Grylls where we had to find a rabbit and cook it (none of us managed it and I’m sure we weren’t expected to - but he showed us how to skin and joint it etc). The teachers literally dropped us on one end of the moor and said see you later; here’s a compass, heres a map. Then we had a whole term of projects leading off that “experience”

biology trip to France. They took us to supermarket - “you aren’t allowed to buy wine” ok- but spirits are fine!

and…
a walk around our home town. We were a tiny primary school. Less than 30 pupils from reception to y6 (I had moved schools!). All very very local families. They took us on a walk around our town. Pointing out different things- I pipe up “yes my dad built that”, “yes my great grandad built that”; other kids “yes we live there” “that’s my nans house”. So they take us to the graveyard - lol. Then to a few of our historic places; which we all spent many hours at. (Think St Michael’s mount)

The Thames Water Barrier. It was soooooo boring.

I'm going to go off tangent and talk about school trips you went on as a parent helper. I went to some old middle age fortification type village and I had to sit next to a girl on the coach who was travel sick. Before long I thought I was going to be sick. Horrible horrible experience. I can still picture her little face over the grey sick bowl. The poor lass.

Also a trip to a museum where I stupidly allowed my son ( maybe 7 or 8 ISH) to drink the milk from one of those sachets the adults were given for their cups of tea. I got a phone call from the teacher later asking about it and telling me i'd set a bad example..not sure I volunteered again after that.

We did similar - in lower 6th we went round a brewery, then basically got let loose on a free bar to ‘teach us how to drink responsibly’.

It was mid naughties, so not the dark ages, but utterly bizarre in hindsight.

I remember a theatre trip for the whole of the infants school, more than a hundred of us. The play was about animals (two mice, a frog, a fox) messing about in a rubbish bin: of course, this was people in rather unconvincing animal costumes. Afterwards, there was a delay with our coaches back, and we were made to sit on the floor of the foyer (more than a hundred of us, in a small West End theatre, very crowded indeed), and to keep very quiet, while the headteacher made a Very Important phone call. I have to admire the teachers for keeping their nerve in a situation like that.

Someone who worked with blind people came in to school to tell us the story of Louis Braille (don't play with knives, children!), and asked for some volunteers to be blind. Nobody put a hand up, so she said there would be a prize for whoever stayed blind the longest. Some children did then volunteer. They were blindfolded, and did things like being walking with a white stick. They were then led to chairs at the front, and were told they could uncover their eyes when they wanted to ("remember that blind people cannot do this!"). Most did after a few minutes, while the lecture continued, but one girl stayed blindfolded all the way through, and never saw the other things that were brought in, such as Braille books. She won the prize, of course.

Sewage works.

Trendy young drama teacher took us to a feminist play. It was incredible but very hard hitting just 4 women about men’s violence / pornography affect on women etc lots of swearing. I remember it to this day! Just remember afterwards the poor teacher was panicked and kept saying “don’t tell your parents”!. I only did gcse drama not level so must have been 15/16.

A trip to Bass Brewery at Burton Upon Trent, I’ll always remember the big tubs of the brewing by product that were off to the marmite factory.

The school trip I didn’t go on: the first Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum in about 1972. I was SO looking forward to it but woke up poorly on the day. I couldn’t go. I cried all day. And I’ve never got over it!

Oh I just remembered a drama trip, to see the Circus of Horrors at our local theatre, which featured a man sticking a vacuum on his cock and walking around like that, amongst other things. We were all sat somewhere near the back but right at the start some of the performers came down into the seats and grabbed me and made me sit right in the front row. The person whose seat I had taken arrived late and was pissed off and had to go sit somewhere else.

I've told this story before, but we went to Drogheda on a primary school trip. I've no idea why, because there's not a lot to see or do in Drogheda. Anyway, our religious teacher decided to pop into the Church to say a prayer. We were invited to view the head of St. Oliver Plunkett. For those of you who don't know of him, St. Oliver Plunkett was a Catholic martyr. He was hanged, drawn and quartered. His severed head is on display in a shrine in the church! It's not a pretty sight.

Same teacher brought us on a school trip to Kilkenny city. We went to some caves near Kilkenny, which were pretty cool. Then the teacher brought us to St. Canice's Cathedral. Why she thought primary school kids (we were 11 or 12) would want to visit a Cathedral is beyond me. I remember trying to buy a souvenir for my Mam in the Cathedral shop.

In secondary school we did a tour of a factory. IIrc they made stationery - notepads and envelopes etc. It was for our Business Organisation class.

McDonalds was fairly new to Ireland back then. In the girl guides we got to do a tour of McDonalds. They gave us a behind the scenes tour - "This is where we make the fries" etc. Then we all had burgers and fries and a drink. It was all very exciting and I remember boasting about it at school that week .

I'm loving all the stories by the way.

The sewage works and the construction site of the new bypass

Saw this and thought I was losing my memory as I neither remember posting this nor going to a farm more than once. Then I realised that you take milk in your americano.

When we were in primary school we went to the botanical gardens, which was actually quite enjoyable until they left another girl and me behind. The teachers realised what had happened on the journey home and our class teacher had to get off the coach and get a regular bus back to us. Then we had to get regular busses back to school which I remember being quite long and involving change as the school was on the south side and the botanic gardens were on the north side.

The sewage works and the construction site of the new bypass

Took the kids there over summer, it’s great.
How is that random when presumably you were studying the Industrial Revolution?

He’s not wrong.

We learned about the Massacre of Drogheda in GCSE History ('The Irish Question' was part of our course in the late 1980s) - I would have been interested to visit, it was by far the most interesting and relevant course in my GCSE history, but we were in south England so out of distance for a field trip.

I agree with you Tayto crisps, there’s not a lot to see or do in Drogheda, I lived there as a child ! At one point it had 13 churches & a population of 22,000.
It hasn’t changed much over the years !