To ask what the worst school trip was that you ever went on?

[MrsKiplin]

Mine was a trip to Belgium. I had a sickness bug the whole time and missed everything!

oh I have a group of 40 unruly students waiting on the bus for me, but before I get aboard I just need to toss off this homeless gentleman

This is the funniest sentence I think I have ever read on mumsnet...I laughed so much, I cried

Orienteering. No one liked me at school so teachers always had to place me in a group. Group I was put with showed their distaste by leaving me in the middle of a wood taking the sodding map and compass with them. A search party had to be mounted.
The afternoon activity was swimming at a lido, I was laughed at because my swimsuit was from marks and spencer and I was 16. Seems stupid now because you wonder how those girls who ridiculed m&s so much knew where the swimsuit was from in the first place.

Another person who was put through the torture of a trip to a sewerage plant in the summer - we did ask what we had done to deserve it!

@CheeseAndBeans oh my god that's terrifying (and I'm so sorry it made me laugh 🤭)

Went on a 4 day residential as a parent volunteer to a national park in the mountains in France with 30 Y3 kids.

Poured all week and food was terrible.
Helping 30 - 8 year old kids put on wet soggy walking boots each day was a struggle as lots of them could not tie their laces.

I slept opposite the boys dorms whilst the teacher was down the corridor with the girls.

Teacher would shut her door and go to sleep snoring louldly leaving me to get in and out of bed continually until 1.00am settling homesick kids.

Ds went down with pneumonia (did not know at the time) so ended up with him in my bed coughing all night long. On arriving back at school I took him straight to hospital where we ended up being admitted.

So no sleep on the trip followed by a week in hospital with no sleep

Same class went on another trip to the alps 2 years later and ds got pneumonia again. Whole class went down with swine flu and they had to stop the coach in France and get medical help for ds.

Funny thing is they still talk fondly about those trips 10 years on :)

University field trip. 30 students in a big coach driving around various sights in the north east including the Humber bridge. That was all fine if a little underwhelming until we got to a certain town. We were supposed to see an antiquarian thing but basically just drove around the town in the coach for an hour. No commentary or anything. Ended up doing a 3 point turn in a residential area where all the locals came out to glare angrily at us so I imagine we were lost. It was just the fact no one talked about it at all. Weird. Shit town and all.

A trip to ASDA to see how they made bread. It wouldn't have been too bad except the baker had a cold, and kept wiping his nose on the back of his hand during the kneading process!! It was a good 5 years before I bought ASDA bread again.

Wicksteed Park, yr8. We were all split up into small groups and sent off on our merry way. The group I was with abandoned me when I was still on a ride so when I got off I couldn’t find them. I was distraught and lost them for the rest of the day, I must have found a teacher instead because they were fucking fuming and gave the other girls a bollocking.

D of E trip, yr10, I still remember eating half cooked pasta whilst the teachers had Chinese takeaway But the worst thing was my friends didn’t understand how tired I was and how my boots were so uncomfy, and left me behind, by the time I’d caught up they were having a rest but as soon as I’d caught up they’d get up and go again. My blisters were awful apparently and my parents let me have 2 days off school because I couldn’t get my socks and shoes on. Unsurprisingly, I only did Bronze!

Recurring theme here of being the slow one I think!

As an assistant cub leader, we took our pack away for a weekend in Granton on Spey. It actually went very well but none of them slept for two nights; by the end all the leaders were drunk with exhaustion. The kids all slept on the bus home. I then went to bed at 6pm and my boyfriend was gobsmacked when he phoned up from his naval base at 7pm to have my father tell him that I was already asleep.

Tame compared to most on here, but I remember going to Alton Towers and a big boy from another school group came over to where I was eating my picnic lunch, and stole my apple.

And a Guide expedition for our orienteering badge. The whole Company was doing the badge, and this was the final part of it - we were split up into two groups, and sent off to do the course the Guider had set - one lot basically clockwise, the others anticlockwise.

The group I was leading got lost on the open common land. We had map and directions and a compass, but still couldn't work out where we were, where we'd gone wrong, and how to get back to where we should be. Eventually an adult hillwalker who happened past, helped us get back on track.

The group my sister was with got lost too. Where they should have turned, they went straight on, over the shoulder of the hill, and ended up in a tiny hamlet called Bedlam - appropriate!

We all did eventually make it back to the Start/Finish point (the Guider's house) but neither group had done the course properly - and if I recall correctly, the group dsis was with had to be driven back by someone from the village - and so we all failed the badge. The Guider was MOST unimpressed, and we all got a good talking-to!

We also did the classic geography trip wading about in a river, and one of my friends lost her footing and went under. Never seen our geography teacher react so fast, it was impressive.

We did an Asda trip too. I remember drawing a shredded wheat cereal box.

Actually I do have a vague memory of a school trip to a supermarket bakery where we watched them making jam doughnuts....wonder why so many of us were taken to supermarkets?

We had a trip to the tip, it was behind the school and we didn't even go in, just drew the outside then walked back to school...

A week in North Yorkshire. Lots of orienteering, wandering around in the mist and wearing damp boots.

Fuck me it was grim.

I did one of those in Northumberland. Stayed in a youth hostel that had used to be an army barracks. It was like a fucking chicken shed.

To all of you complaining about trips to sewage plants, I went to school next to a sewage plant. It wasn't always pleasant

It wasn't the worst trip ever, but we went to London from Yorkshire for the day, to see Hamlet. I was totally uninterested in the play and done how managed to go to the design museum and buy a second hand coat in a retro shop. Both were thrilling, but the play was dull. I dropped English Lit Alevel shortly afterwards

Now, Brownie camps were another thing altogether. I couldn't get to sleep because we had to pray before bed "If I should die before I wake I pray to God my soul to take" And Brown Owl was a cow. One girl wet herself downstairs and was made to walk naked from the waist down up to her room to get dry clothes. I've no idea why my mother made me go every year.

We went to a battery farm. I stopped eating non free range eggs that week.

School ski trip, France, circa 1990. A friend and I returned from the day on the slopes and propped our skis up outside the cafe and went inside for a hot chocolate.

When we came out, the skis were gone. Our punishment given to us by the teachers was to miss the next day's skiing and we were given a toothbrush each, and asked to spend the day cleaning the outside of the coach with the toothbrushes, paying special attention to the tyres.

Surely they were covered under insurance?!

Trip to Runymede which is just a field near the M25 and then a tour of Staines Waterworks on the way back.

Trips to water/sewage works seem to be worst school trips for many people!

@thesteakbakeofawesome
I used to live near there - why on earth did you go to mansfield?

Sewerage farm, 7 years old, the other 2 classes went to a local wildlife park and a theme park.
My mother was furious 😂

Why on earth would anyone go to Mansfield? I grew up near there and it made my home town seem cosmopolitan (that was in part due to the nearby POW camps...)

Went to somewhere in the lakes in last year of school. The cabins had damp everything and reeked of mould. Had to do the ariel runway which we all dreaded, our PE teacher who every girl fancied was waiting at the bottom to help us take the harness off, I was the only one to kick him in the face!. We were split into groups one day and dumped in the middle of nowhere with a map and compass to make our way back. The temperature soared and we arrived back badly sunburnt, dehydrated and reeking of Kendal Mintcake that we had eaten all day to survive. From then on it lashed it down every day, clothing never dried out, we had a disco on the last night and as it was my 16th birthday they made me dance to Alvin Stardust Coo ca choo, happy days!

This thread has really cheered me up, any thread that has the words ‘Tramp Wanker’ deserves to be a mumsnet classic

Loving this thread - it's all coming back to haunt me now!

Some years after the abortive visit to the castle grassy hump, we went on a weeks's trip to Northumberland, where I'm sure we did see a proper castle or two but I can't remember. I do remember us yomping along Hadrian's Wall and the Headmaster insisting on carrying my camera at a particularly rocky bit we all needed to clamber over. He dropped it and the back came open, ruining almost all the pictures I'd taken.

The only other thing about that trip I recall is a rather choppy boat trip up the Tyne in drizzle and a brisk wind, and the pong emanating from some factory or other on the bank, which almost - but not quite - masked the smell from all the vomiting seasick kids.

Another time, we went to the Planetarium and Madame Tussauds. Planetarium was great, Mme T... not so much. Still creeps me out a bit even now. Circa 1972 it was full of sinister and faintly grotesque waxworks of people we'd mostly never heard of and I had funny dreams for ages afterwards.

Oh, and I was another victim of the 6th-form geography 'Standing in the river with a clipboard and a net while other people count rocks and measure stuff' trip. Why???