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!

Infant school trip to the beach in Wales in a sandstorm. Kids crying while being made to run down the beach with sand whipping their legs then eating sandy sandwiches.

Also uni camping trip in Russia. Seven days hiking in the Caucauses in pouring rain with crap tents with poles missing, four adults sharing a three man tent and three sleeping bags, unidentified tinned meat and buckwheat for food. One girl got hypothermia. The 'leaders' all walked at the front of the group of 60 odd teenagers, no head counting or checking people weren't swept away by the river. It was so bad it was hilarious looking back on it.

In between, loads of great trips in Juniors and secondary school. GCSE battlefields trip to Belgium was fab, lax licensing laws plus cheap cherry flavoured cider made for a lot of cheerful 16 year olds. 😂🍒

It's a close call between the abattoir and the mortuary, both dubious choices

Had my first ever migraine on a trip to Greenwich when I was about 14. Fingers started tingling within the first 10 munites of getting there and then spent the rest of the time in the sick bay of the Royal Observatory throwing up, then had to sit through the return coach journey with a splitting headache wretching the whole way.

Mine was also a Geography field trip in uni, to San Francisco!

It was a compulsory module but we had to pay for the flights and accommodation, so almost £1000 out of my student loan. For some reason it was in December, and it absolutely chucked it down the whole week so we were all soaked and freezing.

It was incredibly misogynistic - men constantly following the girls in the group around and shouting things at us. I wore a pretty casual dress one day and the amount of attention it got was absolutely horrible. I remember going to the Castro LGBT museum and asking a member of staff about lesbian history (as everything was pretty much focused on gay men) and he told me all the lesbians had been forced out to Oakland

The amount of homeless people in the city with mental health problems was also really sad and quite shocking, even coming from London. We were out for dinner in one of the nicer areas and a man dived headfirst into a flowerbed, came up with a mouthful of grass and spat it at our feet.

The 'highlight' was probably the night we all tried to go out clubbing. As we were mostly all under 21 nowhere would let us in - apart from a disgusting little strip club. I was v v drunk at that point so didn't realise quite what was going on until we were inside. Obviously wanted to leave but got lost looking for the women's loos and ended up 'backstage' being screamed at in Spanish by half a dozen mostly naked strippers and crying...

It's a close call between the abattoir and the mortuary, both dubious choices

How old were you? Did the abattoir turn you veggie? As eternally traumatized as I personally would have been by the experience, I sometimes wonder whether compulsory school trips to slaughter houses would help cut down on the number of meat eaters in Britain. It could be an effective way of combating the environmental impact the trade has!

The first exchange trip our school had ever done.

We were twinned with a High School in Bavaria. All the pupils there took English to a certain extent so the only ones allowed to take part were the oldest pupils (17-18) who were specialising in languages.
We were an 11 to 16 comprehensive and German was very much an optional subject. Pupils in their O-level year were not allowed to take part so those who did go were between 13 and 15 and some of us had been studying German for only a year.
Consequently the average age difference between English participant and their German partner was about three years - which makes a HUGE difference at that age.

Add to that the fact that I was paired with a boy! Might not seem like a big deal to some but it was to me. I was not yet 14 and was a fairly shy and gauche 13 year old and had no idea what to talk to this very grown up seeming, rather surly, almost 17 year old young man about.

When he stayed with us there were school trips and parties and my parents and older sisters did their best to find trips and outings to entertain him, but I am fairly sure he must have found it rather dull.

When I went to stay with his family (who were lovely) they were horrified by how young I was. There was a younger brother who was about my age and he was considered far too young for this sort of trip but actually the two of us got on much better than I did with his older brother.

On my first morning there I accidentally locked myself in the downstairs loo. No amount of explanation in German from the other side of the door could help me free myself so the younger brother ended up climbig in through the window to get me out!

And then there was the food. I am sure it was lovely really but at that age I had never been abroad and I was used to very "safe" meat and two veg sort of meals. I did like the fact that lots of cake appeared to be on the menu but it was a struggle finding something I liked to drink. They presented me with beer (!), buttermilk :-S, tea that resembled no tea I had ever seen before and when I asked for water it was fizzy mineral water.

But the worst thing was the portion sizes which were HUGE and I had a very small appetite and wasn't sure how to explain. Everyday there was a school trip and the mother provided a packed lunch. However, she gave me the same amount of food as she gave her strapping 17 year old son - four large bread rolls filled with German sausage, a whole packet of biscuits and a large bottle of pop. I couldn't eat even half of it and I didn't know how to explain and didn't want to offend her so I ended up hiding it under the bead in my suitcase. One day, though I came back from a trip and found that while I had been out she had been in my room looking for washing and when I checked all the food in the case had gone. Nothing was said but I assume they always thought of me as that weird little English girl who came to stay with Erhard and hid all her food in her suitcase

Wow that turned out long! Sorry!! And that is without the debacle of the motor bike and swimming in the lake.

A week in Arthog from junior school. Only good thing I remember is the teachers made us stand outside in our nighties for staying awake (looking after a girl having a nightmare and upset her granddad had died but was about 20 of us!) and we decided to try and stay out as long as possible to annoy the teachers. It worked and teachers gave in.

@5foot5 - the fact that he was called Erhard made me laugh, I don't even know why

@Sock Queen, that sounds about right for the cadets! If you remember lots of bunnies hopping about it was probably SMP, there's shit tonnes of them roaming the camp. I was dreading my last stay but it was actually ok. Mostly because they let me stay in a hut all day with a tv, a fridge, a kettle, a fan and a plentiful supply of biscuits.

@Penguinsetpandas We went to Arthog in year 6 too! It was very wet and muddy but I competely loved it at the time.

My secondary school went to Arthog in first year - what would be year 7 now - but my parents decided they couldn't afford it, so I didn't go - maybe I was the lucky one?

What is Arthog? Anyone out there lucky enough to stay at Little Canada on the IoW?

Arthog is an outdoor education centre.

Arthog is just a place in Wales, schools go there from Midlands. When I went there in the 1980s you stayed about 30 kids in one big room to sleep and you had basic food there then you went out to some wet and muddy places in Wales doing things like orienteering or looking at muddy beaches / looking at muddy hills and rivers. Looks like they have more activities now.

The Bedfordshire version of Arthog is called Blue Peris. Known obviously as Blue Penis.

Probably the Year 6 jolly to Pilgrim Fort where 95% of the kids went down with d&v. Started on the first night when one of the kids brought back his baked beans during a circle time sing-song.

Happy to say I (usually a target for bullies) and my also bullied friend were amongst the 5% who dodged the vomit rocket but I can remember looking through the window to the canteen which looked like a war zone with kids on camp beds down both walls.

Looking back on it I don't understand why the teachers didn't cancel or call the parents of the suffering or both but this was the 70's...

Got sent on a 10 day pilgrimage to France.

The list the school sent of what we needed to bring said you needed a change of school uniform & to bring some warm clothes as we'd be in the mountains.
I was 11 & my mum insisted on packing.
My bag was filled with a nightshirt, 2 pairs of knickers, a pair of sallopettes and a change of school uniform along with the school colours knitted bobble hat we had been told we had to bring - she made me turn up on the first day in uniform so that is what I had to wear for the entire ten day trip.
Nothing else in the bag.
No towel, no toiletries, no socks, not even a hairbrush.

We needed the uniform for one afternoon at the end of the trip to sing as a choir, so I was the only one in uniform or purple sallopettes (with school shirt underneath for my only top) for the whole trip.
Everyone else, even the nuns (teachers) wore normal clothes for the majority of the time.

I don't remember much except the embarrassment & pulling back the covers in a hotel room one night to find a load of tiny spiders in the bottom of the bed.

Both of mine were Marwell Zoo - nothing to do with the zoo itself, which is nice enough (we've been there as a family and enjoyed it). But the disasters were with schools, about 30 years apart. The first time I was a teenager on the school outing, and it rained, and rained, and rained. I remember buying an ice lolly and being forced to finish it quickly before getting back on the coach. Not being able to feel your mouth from jaw to nose is a very weird sensation and I don't recommend it.

The second time I was a parent helper at my DD's school. Stupidly I didn't bring my mobile (to be fair this was before smartphones and texting were everywhere). The class teacher was an inexperienced NQT (maternity cover) and hadn't a clue on communication. Somehow our group got separated from the rest. I had a combination that was impossible to herd together: two tall energetic boys, the shortest tiniest girl in the year and another girl who apparently had tummy trouble and kept needing the loo. It was very hot, tempers were short and the class teacher was brusque and sulky when we finally got hold of her. I don't know how much my feedback had to do with it, but subsequent trips were much better organised.

The VIth form economics trip to Brussels, that our parents paid £££ for and consisted of 3 days solid drinking at an Irish bar, filling in a couple of worksheets at the youth hostel and literally falling asleep from tired-and-hungover-ness in a meeting room the one time we went anywhere near the EU buildings. One boy picked up an older woman at the bar, went off clubbing with her, nicked her purse and turned up in the early hours of the morning lying in the middle of the road outside the youth hostel, shouting “I’m drunk! I’m really, really drunk!” until the two sensible teachers on the trip hauled him inside. The other teacher who had actually organised the trip was a multi-millionaire who taught economics to stop himself getting too bored and just went home if the class misbehaved. The lowlight was getting thrown out of the EU leaflet ‘shop’ by security guards because we were taking too many leaflets

A sad visit to a concentration camp in Germany.

Awful to imagine such suffering. Glad I went, though.

We were also brought to a sewers, aged about 9. The lunch was provided but they'd given us cans of shandy mistaking them for Fanta. The drive back had vomiting..

Residential as a practise for Duke of Ed proper. About 16, late nineties.It was horrible. It was freezing and tipping rain the whole weekend. They made us get up in the night for a practise fire alarm and we had to stand in the courtyard in the freezing rain in our pyjamas to be counted. The next day we spent about 8 hours tramping up a mountain, then were forced to have communal fucking showers for the first (and only) time, followed a hideous kum bah ya evening of enforced kiddie fun that we were much too old for, from a lunatic with a banjo.
The popular girls had vodka smuggled in water bottles and there was some bad drama about spin the bottle in the night which meant a teacher had to get up and take a hysterical drunk teenager who'd been ostracised as an apparent lesbian into her own room for the night.
Two of the other teachers (both married) were having an affair and clearly using the trip as a shagging opportunity so were effectively useless. Another teacher was extremely anorexic and clearly very miserable. She confiscated our bits of contraband make up and didn't give them back. Still cross about that. And of course I got my period and had to try change a towel behind a tree in the rain.

Blackbird that sounds horrendous.

I hated the Duke Of Edinburgh Award and was coerced into doing it by school.

The practice for the expedition was a nightmare of freezing weather, sleepless nights in tents and two girls kept threatening to go home. I refused to do the actual expedition stroppy teen and so didn't get the award.

As a parent accompanying a year 2 class.Never again!

French Exchange in year 8. It was a great trip but we got to a castle and it was raining. I'd borrowed a Mac off my mum (such a cool 12 year old) and tried to get it over my head rather than unzipping it. It wouldn't go over so when unzipping it I managed to get it caught on my eyelid. Not only did it hurt like hell, but the teachers had to step in and help me and it ended up bleeding. It also earned me the nickname "Zippy" for my remaining 3 odd years at school.