13 Oct Field Tripping With Bathrooms
What is your earliest embarrassing moment? When you go back in memory and recall the first time you remember is the feeling like you’d choose to curl up and disappear, what comes to your mind? Maybe it takes you totally back to when you were six, headed out for a school trip with the entire first grade.
Field trip days are exciting days, because you’re leaving the school and won’t need to do schoolwork. As a substitute, you get to engage in something aside from the norm. You board the bus, get a seat mate, and you’re on your way for an enjoyable day at the zoo.
On the hour drive north, you try not to pay attention to the fact that buses always make you feel slightly restless. Rather, you chat with your neighbor, wonder what you got in your sack lunch, and before you realize it, you’ve arrived.
You spend the next couple of hours walking around and seeing the several animals and having fun with your classmates. At noon, you take a break together on a grassy lawn area and eat lunch, brown paper sacks, bologna and cheese sandwiches, and children making a colorful, moving patchwork in the warm May sunshine.
After eating, you check out the far edge of the zoo where the lions and bears are, hang around watching the sea lions swim, admire the elephants, and afterwards take a pass by the gorillas and monkeys on your way back to the main square at 1:30. You’ve got only 15 minutes before it will be time to acquire back on the bus and head for home.
Yet, just then, your eye sees on something really magical. Cotton candy. Big, huge, colorful swabs of it on those long cardboard sticks. Greedily, you take out the money in your pocket that your mom tucked there before you left that morning, and you hand it over in swap for one of those miraculous bunches of total sugar gluttony.
You begin eating it and enjoy the phenomenon of the way it melts in your mouth in a completely delightful way, each time. And, before you know it, the teachers are saying it’s time to load the buses. Everyone is getting together with their class group, following their teacher, who is checking out the list to make sure that everyone is accounted for. When all is said and done, you leave, and you’re on your way home.
All is going great … for some time, anyway. Then. At some point, your native tendency toward carsickness rears its ugly head. Within a matter of minutes, you’re downright sick. Your stomach is feeling like a roller coaster and it isn’t calming down. And then it dawns on you, a thought almost worse than the physical uneasiness of feeling nauseated: What happens if I can’t make it back to the school?
You make it, though. You do. You literally hear the bell ring declaring the end of the day as the bus pulls up to the north side of the school. However, just as the bus is rolling to a stop, you freak out. Completely puke. Like, cotton candy everywhere, all around yourself.
Oh, and did we mention that you were at the very front of the bus? Being covered in yuck, smelling awful, and finally feeling a little relief because it’s out (phew!), you feel something else. Total unpleasantness. Total humiliation. Total wishing you could just curl up and disappear so everyone wouldn’t have to see you as they file past and escape the bus. (Why, oh why, couldn’t you have been sitting at the back?!).
Well. Maybe this isn’t your story, but it highlights something we think makes motorcoaches ideal for school groups. THERE’S A BATHROOM ON BOARD! Ummmmmm, nuff said, especially with younger school children. The whole incident recounted above could have been prevented completely, had there been an available bathroom to use. You never know if someone is going to be sick or need to use the toilet, although that they didn’t have to go before you left on the sightseeing tour. (Cuz, duh, that’s how it always happens.).
Next time you’re finalizing the details for an upcoming field trip with elementary kids, give our bus rental Maine a try. See what convenient, affordable, friendly, professional customer service looks like!
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