Memories of school field trips

But, whether a trip is educational, physical, or a little more adventurous than the school allowed for, you certainly remember them.

SOME of the best memories I have of school are the field trips.

I'm prompted in this thought by the story in yesterday's paper showcasing Wairarapa College's geography field trip, which ranged as far north as Rotorua.

It's perhaps an irony that my first geography field trip, as an Onslow College student, was to Wairarapa. In the eighties, Wairarapa was the place for school field trips from Wellington, which in my case was either the fourth-form tramp to Mt Holdsworth or the seventh-form geography camp at Riversdale Beach. In my day, tramps into the Tararuas were probably a dangerously casual operation, with kids (seemingly) a lot more resilient and fitter than they are today and ultra-fit and slightly mad maths teachers unburdened by risk assessment documentation.

I remember, many years later, hearing about how a large contingent of fourth-formers from my old school had to be rescued from the Tararuas, and I recall thinking: wimps. Which was unkind, of course. We could have just as easily come to grief.

But, whether a trip is educational, physical, or a little more adventurous than the school allowed for, you certainly remember them. You remember them as experiences that might involve some discomfort and homesickness, but it forced you to break your sheltered routine and get your hands dirty. The geography trip to Riversdale, nearly 30 years ago, is still in my mind as a wild, bleak landscape of hissing sand and sandhoppers (which we were supposed to find), but I can recall the charts we had to do, mapping the flora and fauna from dunes to the water's edge.

I have great respect for schools that can provide this break in routine. They are expensive affairs as well. I don't think I learned much about sandhoppers and the pretty diagrams we did were probably the kind of formulaic thing teachers get you to do.

But at Riversdale Beach at the wrong time of year, you learn a lot about being away from your parents and your own bed, eating what's put in front of you, and being cold. These are good lessons to learn. Since that was my only visit to Riversdale Beach, and my memories are of dusk and elusive insects, perhaps I need to give myself some good memories and head there in the summer. But it was still a good trip as a schoolkid.