MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I remember Stibbington, Scarbourgh and Wye valley to not see some peregrine falcons. I also remember not being allowed on the big Belgium trip as I had been naughty. Not sure what I had done, but me and the other lad who didn't go, did then borrow the headmasters cigarettes from his desk 😆 All a distant memory now.
Where did you lot go?
Hadrians Wall, Edinburgh Zoo, National Museum of Scotland and Rhine Valley.
SS Uganda - of Falkands fame - "educational" tours of the Med. Very educational for convent school girls having their stomachs pumped after too much ouzo in Rhodes. That and the flick knife trade!!!
Residential ones...
Blue Peris (owned by the borough) near Llanberis - went many times
Netherswell Manor (owned by the borough) near Stow on the Wold
Swanage a-level geography field trip
Various trips to London for different reasons
Lower school ones...
Woburn Safari Park
British Museum
Standalone Farm
East Barnby outdoors education centre - twice
Danby Fryup
(That) London
Angers in France - shithole
Oh, and as part of the most random GCSE subject ever (Nautical Studies) a week on a 72ft sailing boat round the north east coast of the U.K visiting delightful places like Blyth and Hartlepool.
Not school but as a Cub Scout living in Singapore we went up to the Malay jungles for a few days.
Byker wall and left to get on with it. An interesting area to let kids from outside the area to wander around doing surveys.
Day trip to Calais, various kentish castles (Dover, Leeds, Rochester etc).
A riotous week on the Isle of Wight (aged 8).
London for the Tower, Science and Natural History Museums.
Field trips to East Cliff Folkestone and Hothfield Common. Ooh, and a camera club trip to York for a week.
Thornbridge Hall residential in primary school.
Memorable events:
1 - Mr Plant (head teacher) told us The Monkey's Paw and threw a paper towel soaked in lighter fluid onto the fire right at the moment when the monkey's paw is destroyed. Shit us right up.
2 - Miss Norris saw lots of horse manure on the road and went up later with some carrier bags to collect it for her garden. We all thought this was the most disgusting thing we'd ever seen.
We did a couple of residentials in secondary school somewhere around Mayfield Valley/Ringinglow/Whiteley Woods in Sheffield, but I can't find the place now.
Memorable events:
1 - I got stung by a wasp after spraying a can of Lynx Africa into a wasp hole in the house wall
2 - Muraf Ali got detention for creeping into the bathroom block before everyone else woke up and having a 90 minute shower, using up all the hot water.
Secondary school French class trip to Boulogne
Memorable event:
I got held up at gun point and had my spending money taken off me. Spent the entire day in Boulogne nick looking at photofits while everyone else was drinking cheap French lager in the town square. Told school I'd had £20 pinched and they gave me £20 back. It was actually £5 I had nicked. Result!
The best ever trip, and one I'll never forget was a few nights stay on the world's 2nd oldest floating warship training ship Foudroyant. We scrubbed the decks, ate at the long tables and slept in hammocks. Fkn brilliant it was!
I never went but our friend's son is currently on a trip to New York!
Also, obligatory school trip story:
NSFW language
Mallam in Yorshire (year 4 I think). Couldn't afford to do any others.
2 trips to London for Schoolboy International footy at (the old) Wembley including watching stock car racing at Wimbledon (MILES more better)
Numerous camping trips.
2 trips to Howtown outdoor centre, Ullswater. (including an ascent up Hellvellyn straight up from Red Tarn, on snow/ice in January all roped up.
1 trip to Thurston outdoor centre, Coniston.
A sailing course on Derwent Reservoir, 1 day a week for 6 weeks.
All between around 1968 & 1972.
Wouldn't happen nowadays, H & S & all that crap. More's the pity. 🙄
Bath - when I was in y5 or y6
Hotel got trashed
School trips were banned for several years afterwards
The Waverley paddle steamer, from the Costa del Stranaer around Ailsa Craig and back.....
Stronord outdoor centre at Kirroughtree - seem to remember looking at Roche Moutone and ice scouring on what is now McMoab...
And a fifth year drinking and smoking trip to Switzerland which was almost as awful as Richard Dawsons "The Vile Stuff"
The trips away were the best bit of school.
wouldn't happen nowadays, H & S & all that crap. More's the pity.
With the possibly exception of watching stock car racing at Wimbledon, kids still do all of those things.
With the possibly exception of watching stock car racing at Wimbledon, kids still do all of those things.
Not from a secondary modern school at age 12-15 they don't ( & paid for by the school/local council) Unless you can correct me. Love to know if it does happen cos it bloody well should!
Rugby - Various. Highlight being a trip to play in Hong Kong. Which was ace.
Skiing - Various, mainly France.
Outdoor - School had a house in Capel Curig, so we had many trips up there. Also did the Three Peaks, Ten Tors, that sort of thing.
Theatre/Opera/Music - Many, mostly in London.
I was quite lucky to go to France skiing, Iceland on a geography trip and best of all Hong Kong, Japan and Australia for 3 weeks on a rugby tour! If I'd been any use at cricket id also have had the opportunity to go to Barbados, but my parents wallet probably wouldn't have allowed it (and fair enough!).
My school was very good for trips, there were India trips, Atlas Mountains, Kilimanjaro and various other trips available to students of all different interests.
Oh man. The French Trip.
Most of my year, about 100 of us, went on a French trip for a week, we were year 8 so about 12-13. The first few days were standard issue, boring French trip stuff, trying to buy flick-knives and porn, avoiding fights with the local kids, asking random French people "Parlay voo Onglais?" and then doing all the quiz questions in English, that sort of thing.
Then on about the third day the crappy hotel were were in decided to liven things up by giving us all food poisoning. All of us. The entire year spent the night vomiting and shitting absolutely everywhere, as did most of the teachers. We were four to a room, so once one kid was barfing in the loo and the other in the sink, the bathroom was full, and the whole place got rather brutally redecorated in very short order. It was horrific. Quite a few kids soiled their beds too, so with that and all the spew-spattered walls and upholstery I suppose we exacted our revenge on the hotel. The last two days were spent recovering and then just arsing about at the beach before coming home with a deep-seated suspicion of French cooking and no inclination to utter a further word of their god-forsaken tongue for some considerable time.
I didn't go on any more school trips after that one.
Isle of Man day trip in choppy waters! I bought a blondie poster. And was seasick .
Chester zoo .
Wye valley- wetter than Cumbria !!
St. Cast & Paris . First snog.
We had run ins with the local kids at both the Wye valley and St Cast.ha.
Several trips to Muncaster bloody castle- always when raining !
& Some brilliant stays at Eskdale outward bound .
We didn't have enough money to do loads of school trips ,skiing etc.
Stockholm, Helsinki, Leningrad, Copenhagen.
Was a cool trip 🙂
Only one I ever went on was 3rd year juniors (yr 5 nowadays), Copt Oak youth hostel Leicestershire, had to walk there from Beaumont Leys, also in Leicester!!
Arthog
The Uganda! My wife and my brother did the "school cruise" on that one. They went round the Baltic capitals in the last year of primary school. 2 years earlier my trip at the same age was to Vigo, Lisbon and Tangiers. To this day the smell of curry (Asian domestic crew), disinfectant or puke takes me back to the crossing on the Bay of Biscay when it seemed to me that I was the only kid not being sick and wishing the open air pool was open.
It ws a big deal with kids from all over mixing. To me, meeting kids form other FoD schools was an eye opener!
Primary school:
St Fagan's in Cardiff, Northleach Church (brass rubbings!), a farm place somewhere and the Cutty Sark.
Secondary:
Bath and Bristol
Kilvrough Manor field centre on the Gower (GCSE and A Level Geography field trips)
Ypre (for GCSE history).I remember everyone being so well behaved for the entire trip.
Patterdale on an outward bound holiday
[quote=mattsccm said]The Uganda!
Yup! 1981, just before it headed off to the Falklands.
Day trip to Calais, various kentish castles (Dover, Leeds, Rochester etc).
the same (except I think it was Boulogne rather than Calais)
definitely remember Dover and Rochester castles, plus Lullingstone villa, and Battle
London Zoo, British Museum, Science Museum, Tate Gallery
Oh and Barry Island Butlins
Stayed with a German family in Heidelberg for 2 weeks on a language exchange. Their living room had wallpaper which made it seem as if it was in a forest. My exchange partner was into Pink Floyd and the family owned a chemist shop. Highlight of the trip was inserting fire crackers into the hard boiled eggs that had been given to us for the train journey back and lobbing them out of the train window as we waited in cologne station. My effort landed in a news kiosk and exploded with hilarious consequences. Oh how the teachers laughed..
Did anyone not go to Quarry Bank Mill, near Manchester? The wife and I both did, despite living several hours away in different directions. I think it was the law.
Dalguise Outdoor Centre in Primary 5
London Village by train in P7 which included a tour round the old Wembley, Madame Tussauds, Planetarium, tour of the Houses of Parliament etc. best part was waving goodbye to the crappy packed lunches left on the platform as the train pulled out of Kings Cross.
Secondary school we went to Lochgoilhead twice, two skiing trips to Aviemore and one to Andalo in the Italian Dolomites.
School trips these days for my kids are not as good and are bloody expensive £500 for 3 days in Paris!
Our school didn't do any trips abroad. Such things sound fantastical and exotic to a Glagow school boy.
In fact about the only trip I can remember was going up to Stonehaven to see the fishing museum. Oh and seeing the hydro dam at Pitlochry. Gripping stuff. 🙁
The Doon beach (4 miles from Kirkcudbright in Primary school 🙁 , was raining and miserable.
Didn't go on any other trips in the 4 High schools i was a pupil at. (sad sack - still traumatised) 😉
Lullingstone roman villa, first year of junior school.
Guess who pushed someone in the river.
What Primary did you go to Somafunk?
Johnston primary for p1, p2, then 4 others up in Argyllshire area for rest then back down to Johnston in p7. Kirkcudbright academy for 6 months 1st year then 3 high schools up in Argyllshire and back down to Kirkcudbright academy for last month of 4th year and 5th year. ****ing hated kirkcudbright academy with a vengeance, if you weren't a farmers son or lived up snobs hill then you were just an inconvenience to the school.
SS Uganda tour of the Med, with my brother, a month or so before she went to the Falklands. My parents were offered a full refund if they didn't want to send us as Israel and Lebanon were getting pretty close to war.
Even as a 10 year old I felt a bit afraid in Israel. It was strange seeing guns everywhere and tanks parked at the side of the road.
It was an awesome experience and I am eternally grateful to my parents for scraping the money together to send us.
Ones I remember ..
Wurzburg twice (I remember roaming the streets quite drunk in the small hours after a house party that my exchange student had refused to go to not being really sure how to get back)
Skiing , Austria and France
Theatre in London
Norwich including the open market when it used to sell all sorts of dodgy knives etc.
Grimes Graves
Cambridge
The one I remember as being most outstanding was going to CERN and being so tired I fell asleep and started snoring loudly in a lecture by one of Europe's finer physicists. I got woken fairly sharpish. In my defence I'd slept on a lab floor at Cambridge uni the night before and been on a 7am flight out of stansted and I really don't mornings. It was an incredible facility even then and this was 20+ years ago.
"Uganda boys" - can you remember dorm name - "Speke" for me, bro was "Wingate" 4 years earlier.
Some wicked girls on my cruise!!! And we loved sneaking into main part of the ship especially around tea time. We were young for the cruise (13-14) but allowed to explore each place in groups of 3-4 without teachers. In the (good old) days before H&S. Not that the parents of the girls expelled for drinking would agree!!! 😉
Lullingstone roman villa, first year of junior school.
Guess who pushed someone in the river.
rofl
actually we used to go to that river for geography field trips too. measuring stuff like flow rates in different positions.
probability of one person getting dunked was approaching 1.
**** hated kirkcudbright academy with a vengeance, if you weren't a farmers son or lived up snobs hill then you were just an inconvenience to the school.
^A fair conclusion! At the time I had nothing to compare it to, but it did nothing for me. I thought at the time having prefects and head boys/girls was totally pretentious and the school [i]Rector[/i] was a bully.
So not my happiest days either - shame cause I loved growing up there.
Florida !!
30odd 13/14 year old lads tearing it up in Disney Land, Bush Gardens, MGM and Epcot (for educational purposes :lol:)
Skate boards bought early (double cheap back then when in the US, I bought a Jason Jesse mini ... the sun god one) so we could session the hotel parking lots every evening.
But the best day of that two weeks was Teenage School Boys Heaven, also known as .... Wet n Wild
Massive water slides and girls wearing bikinis (uk girls NEVER did that in the early 90s) ... But there was some education.... Amy Spears from Louisiana certainly taught me something in the Lazy River. 8)
Primary 7 - 40 kids stranded on Arran when the weather took a turn for the worse and the ferry back to Ardrossan was cancelled until late in the evening. 39 hungry kids all staring at me as I tucked into a sausage supper on Brodick seafront provided by the bus driver who happened to be my uncle.
Toga party in the Loch Ericht hotel in Dalwhinnie on a weekend skiing trip to Aviemore.
No school trip was organised for the sixth years in my final year at high school. In protest, we had a whip round, booked a coach to pick up the entire sixth year at the school at 5:30 on a Thursday and pissed off to Blackpool for the day unsupervised. The School were not amused.
sausage supper...provided by the bus driver who happened to be my uncle
Real uncle or 'special sausage uncle'? 🙂
Real uncle or 'special sausage uncle'?
😆 Actual, honest to goodness, Dad's oldest brother, uncle.
but "uncle" sausage is always special innit?
rofl
actually we used to go to that river for geography field trips too. measuring stuff like flow rates in different positions.probability of one person getting dunked was approaching 1.
I'm glad someone appreciated it!
The teachers had been making a thing about it for weeks before hand. if you pushed someone in you were dead meat, somehow I knew it was gonna be me. we were down by the ford and pub in Farningham village, my mate was stood right at the edge he said he'd like to go in. next thing you know I pushed him. No real punishment either.
Another one for SS Uganda, May 1980 I think.
Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
Seemed to remember it being a good trip until sea sickness caught up with me in the last few days!
No drunken, debauched behavior here, I was only 10!
Whitby & Robin Hood's bay in Juniors, plus Henry Moire sculpture park.
Power station in Selby (iirc), highlight of that trip was hearing on the coach radio that Maggie Thatcher was out. That & pocketfuls of earplugs to flick at the girls all day.
Camping trip to Sherwood Forest, basically running wild for 4 days while the teachers nursed hangovers and then produced new ones.
Could never afford to go on the foreign ones.
Visited the local brewery with the rest of my chemistry A level class, but the teacher would only let us have a half 🙁
Also visited the Pyramids in Cairo, but that was as a teacher, and not half as fun!
Two weeks in the French alps in summer 1990.
Fantastic holiday. They took us to the UN headquarters, Lake Geneva, up Mont Blanc and a ton of other stuff.
We had a couple of girls in our year who saw the European trips as a great business opportunity.
A week in Innsbruck could see most of North Manchester clothed in shoplifted Sergio Tacchini.
All shall have new trainers.
They even used to take orders before the trip
😐
Minworth sewage works - a real highlight (if only for the humour relating to the volume of johnnies in the sewage)
We used to go on Summer Camp, lots of this sort of thing happened in the states.
Mostly we went to St Pete's or Naples, invariably sailing, building camps, fires, egos'.
T'was ace.
A friends school used to do trips to Sellafield - before Sellafield had a visitor centre- so it was a tour in and around the working facility.
On the way out they'd pass through a radiation detector that would go off for every third or forth pupil. The guide would just laugh and say 'don't worry, it does that all the time.'
For ourselves I can remember a geography field trip to to Grassmere to see how thousands of years of glacial erosion had created textbook example of a tourist trap. And a sixth form trip to Paris - we couldn't quite make up the numbers for the trip to be viable so one of our teacher's wives recruited 6 girls from the school she taught at in central Liverpool. They. were. ****ing. mental.
I went to Minworth too. It was at junior school so jonny jokes were a bit 'blue' for us.
One year halfof the year went to Legoland, then other half went to Snibston science park. I went to Snibston. Legoland would probably have been more fun.
Wouldn't happen nowadays, H & S & all that crap. More's the pity.
Rubbish. I'd bet all those things still happen. They certainly did (much later than the 70s) when I was at school. We went here http://www.redridgecentre.co.uk/ and it still seems to be doing well.
We were let loose in Istanbul, Athens, Naples, Corfu, Rhodes etc in groups of 3 and no adults and not a hi-viz jacket between us.
And climbing in the Peaks and Snowdonia - teachers would be fired for what we got away with 😉
The best ever trip, and one I'll never forget was a few nights stay on the world's 2nd oldest floating warship training ship Foudroyant. We scrubbed the decks, ate at the long tables and slept in hammocks. Fkn brilliant it was!
I spent a week on her in my second year at University, working on the upkeep. Absolutely facinating, especially delving in places below decks as we were intended to get some insight into her construction methods etc. This was just before she went to Hartlepool and was restored. Well worth a visit if you ever go there
Now reverted to her original name, HMS Trincomalee
http://www.hms-trincomalee.co.uk
At primary school we went on a 5-day trip to Brittany. We saved up for about 12 months in advance by taking in a few quid each week.
At high school we went to Quarry Bank Mill (mentioned earlier) twice! But it was only a 45-min drive for us. We went to what was called the Menai Centre on Anglesey too. Also went on a 3-day netball trip to Cardiff, which was hideously boring (the netball was boring, NOT Cardiff!)
In the 6th Form I went on an A-level biology trip to the Nelson Centre on Anglesey, mucking about in rock pools and measuring limpets.
Meant to add this to the above:
My best trips were the two sailing 'expeditions' whilst at 6th form college. Starting at Calshot activities centre, sail in Wayfarers to Newtown Creek IOW, camp. Get up at stupid O'clock to catch the tide and sail all round the bottom of the IOW and camp at Bembridge. A very long day in a dinghy. Sail to Camp near Bosham to the east of Portsmouth, get pissed on local cider at the Old House at Home Chidham ( I had never encountered real cider before).
Get up with the worst headache ever at 5 am the following morning to sail back to Calshot . I didn't start to feel even vaguely well until we were past Gosport.
Marvelous ( except I can't touch cider to this day)
cairo zoo
cairo citadel
butser hill
some youth hostel in wales
calshot
marwell zoo
somewhere in france by the sea
My Dad was head of Modern Languages at a large Comp in Walsall. Frrom the late 50s he took students on foreign trips all the way through until the early 80s when they shut the steelworks and, well, everything else.
My memories of being small are of Easter and Summer holidays on a coach travelling all round France and Germany from about 4 years old up till 11 or 12.
From school we went to Beaudesert for a week, to the Lakes for a week, Carding Mill Valley, various castles, Shakespeare at Stratford and the Ludlow festival, then there was Youth Orchestra - Yugoslavia, France, Belgium and Holland, and also Germany. I was never allowed to go to Alton Towers at the end of summer term because my parents didn't approve 🙁
Dieppe - famous for bringing back knives & fireworks; particularly the wrongly implemented good cop / bad cop drill on a bus full of innocent faces in the wee hours of the morning - if you haven't broken us with the bad cop drill it's no use trying good cop 😀 The following morning it was like an Airfix WWII around the villages of Sussex.
Bournemouth, York &
Paris (as 6th formers including late night trolley races & cheap wine)
inchcolm island
&
castlerigg religous retreat
Malvern at middle school and Llangurig at high school, both awesome - I may say I pulled a hilarious stunt at Llangurig, bought some dried fruit on the way up then laid it out so that Mr Steteczny thought I was eating rabbit droppings ( and not sultanas - hopefully...).
I was the dropout that stopped our history class going to Moscow in 1989 - with the benefit of hindsight.. 🙁
esselgruntfuttock - Member
2 trips to London for Schoolboy International footy at (the old) Wembley
Did a few of those. Being down in Devon it made for a nice trip. The footy was boring though.
Also quite a few trips to Science Museum (yay) / Natural History Museum (yawn, except bits where you could press buttons).
Numerous trips to various coastal bits round Devon. Our school used to go to Barbrook a lot also, doing Valley of the Rocks, Lynton/Lynmouth, Watermouth Castle.
Then north Wales, I forget where we stayed but was Geography trip with some eco warrior farm, hydro damn place, Snowdon, Ffestiniog down the slate mine (way before the bike place was built sadly), up the railway.
Hinkley Point nuclear power station, wearing radiation detectors 😀
Not exactly a trip as such, but had a period of local-ish activity stuff every few weeks involving option of either rock climbing on Dartmoor or pot holing somewhere under Buckfastleigh. I did the pot holing. Loved it at the time, but no way I'd do it now. Idea of crawling down tight squeeze muddy holes head first with no way of turning back or around, just relying on the instructor in front freaks me out now. Pretty sure this would be a H&S victim now.
Only overseas was ski trip to Zell Am See where I learnt to ski.
look like the Uganda was a bit popular!! My trip was in about'75 she must have been quite new then. Big storm in Med one night lost the gangplank all decks awash with vom. Warks LA had centre at Llandudno junction so a few trips there great orm in 6th form also trawsfynnyd enjoyed that fast forward to 2000 taking trips as teacher to Howtown great fun doing the outward bound thing
Going to see the Mary Rose and Golden Hinde in primary school. I can't recall anything mischievous happening.
Then at secondary school ...
Holland: flicknives, ninja stars, a bunch of us getting a) lost after leaving the hotel and then b) into a fight with the local kids. That was the first 'proper' fight I'd been. There was blood and awkward should-I-kick-or-punch manoeuvres followed by running away. Also our first introduction to drinking lager.
Brittany (France, not Spears): everyone except me and a mate got food poisoning from shell fish. So just for good measure wheel fish was served the next night again. Two of us ate well that night.
Austria ski trip: during the bus journey I quaffed 2 litres of strawberry yop bought at a French service station, then promptly vomited in the bus. We arrived in our hotel room to discover a p0rn stash under the mattress in the dorm. Like good school children, we have them to Mr Matthews the gym teacher. Never saw those again and a few years later I heard he was to be investigated on suspicion of something. Then one of the lads in the dorm kept finding notes scrawled with writing about Acacia Avenue on his pillow. We finally discovered it was one of the kids who had gone a bit mental with his Iron Maiden fantasy.
Then I moved to boarding school near Oxford and the ski trip was to Colorado and would cost £6,000. So I didn't go to that.
Strangely I don't recall any school trips going 'up north'. It must've been too dangerous.
Which rector of kbt academy? Not big Jim?
I'll declare an interest I went there and my dad taught there.