Having grown up in L.A., my first field trip was the Port Of Los Angeles, in the first grade. Afterwads we all had to draw pictures of boats. Some years later we went to see The Magic Flute and Pinocchio at the Dorothy Chandler–and I can’t remember any others until we get to my senior year of high school, when we had three excellent ones, all in my Physical Anthro class–the Natural History Museum, the San Diego Zoo, and a ride out to hear Donald Johansen lecture on Lucy at CalTech (this was 1975).
For me, in retrospective, the single most coolest thing, and probably the only cool trip my high school biology teacher took us (and only good act she did), was take her biology classes across the street so we could see a transmission electron microscope up close.
My high school is part of the state university system, and the Natural Sciences department keeps an electron microscope. During one of the annual “this is a microscope” lectures, the teacher took us there to see it.
It is very very nerdy, but now I realize how lucky we were. Such things are uncommon, many of my coworkers hadn’t seen one before until they came to work here. And when I saw one again, after many years, I went “Hey, that looks familiar!”
Many of my field trips were to things like museums or age-appropriate events like plays or exhibits. In high school, they wanted us to bond as a class, so we took annual “let’s go out somewhere” trips, to places with lagoons or pools and recreational facilities.
Between elementary school, high school, and family trips, I went to the following places at least once, sometimes up to 4 times:
Castillo Serrallés
Centro Ceremonial Tibes
Hacienda Buena Vista
Museo de Arte de Ponce (in English)
Museo de arte de Puerto Rico
Faro de Fajardo y cabezas de San Juan- The area around this lighthouse is a mangrove forest.
And duh, being from San Juan, of course we went to Old San Juan. 
I was a few years behind you, same general location (Glen Burnie). Did you perhaps go to Fort McHenry? I certainly remember that, in addition to the ‘big’ field trip to the Smithsonian. I also remember going to Hershey, PA, to tour the chocolate factory. Back in those days, when you were done the tour, you got a folder that held information on chocolate (history and making) as well as a full-sized Hershey bar, and a packet of Hershey chocolate milk mix!
Bethesda Lutheran Communities for the mentally and physically disabled.
Forest Products Laboratory in Madison the USDA’s research facility that has researched most of the new wood products used for construction in the USA.
We were taken to the public library in a lower grade to get us all signed up for cards.
We were taken to clinics for mass inoculations in different years. These types of class trips involved everybody walking to the destination in your class groups and then back to the school.
One year we got to go to the Milwaukee zoo for the class picnic.
Other than that in grade school we had a last day class trip to a local park. I think one year might have been at the MacKenzie Environmental Center when the displays and buildings were still in good shape. They have a lot of stuffed animals and examples of genetic freaks. They still raise pheasants for release into the wild. There is a small rescued animal zoo.
One field trip that sticks out in my memory was a fourth grade trip in to the Alabama capitol building. This was in 1986, during George Wallace’s last term as governor. During the tour we walked through the governor’s office. He was not in. Many of us had the same question for the nice young tour guide lady.
Us: Why isn’t there a chair at the desk?
Tour guide lady: Well, as you know, Governor Wallace uses a wheelchair. [The way she said it, it was obvious that she’d answered this one many, many times before.]
Us: Oh yeah…
My 9-year-old self, and I’m sure plenty of my classmates knew that he used a wheelchair, but we didn’t put it together until she told us.
We had good school trips:
The Giant’s Causeway
The Coca-Cola bottling plant
A Norman Castle
And bad school trips:
A water treatment plant
A forest
Just remembered: also two field trips to Mt St Helens, once in 5th grade and once again in middle school, and a trip to Mt Rainier in high school. Oh, and trips to The Evergreen State College for some ecological thing, and to the University of Washington twice, once for a language day and once for an engineering day.
I went all sorts of places, now that I look at it.
Let’s see:
Zoo Atlanta and the Cyclorama
Chickamauga Battlefield
random train ride
Georgia state capitol
Sequoyah Caverns
Newspaper (saw the printing press in action)
Cheese factory
Coca-Cola bottling plant
Oh and my favorite was a trip to Atlanta to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My favorite because I was a young lad and the ladies’ costumes were (ahem) rather sheer. The play was nice, too, I guess.
Detroit 'burbs here.
Several trips each to Greenfield Village and Ford Motor Co.
I remember walking along the catwalks at Ford, looking down at the orange-hot steel being poured into molds. Don’t know if a kid ever fell into a mold.
mmm
We had all that sort of stuff.
I went to a public high school, but it was a selective high school that seemed to do more of this sort of thing than regular public schools. There were extended trips that took anything from two to four nights, with each grade going to a different location.
Grade 7 was Otford, in the rainforest areas south of Sydney (2 nights). We did stuff like bushwalking, flora and fauna identification, etc.
Grade 8 was the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, in the Riverina area of New South Wales. It was focused on different agricultural practices, and we got to visit orchards, canneries, rice farms, vineyards, etc. It rained for all four days, and we were in tents at a campground. Miserable.
Grade 9 was Hill End, a gold-mining region west of Sydney, near Bathurst. We learned about mining, visited old mines and mining towns, etc. Three nights, i think.
I can’t remember where the Grade 10 trip was. Can’t have been very exciting.
Grade 11 was the best. All of the lower-grade trips involved considerable amounts of work; stuff like filling out questionnaires, drawing maps of irrigation systems, etc. But grade 11 was skiing in the Snowy Mountains. Three days of nothing but ascending on t-bats and gondolas, and descending on skis.
I also went on a few other trips, related to specific classes or extra-curricular clubs.
Our Grade 8 social studies class did a three-day tip to Canberra, where we visited Parliament House, the War Memorial, the National Art Gallery, and a bunch of other attraction. That class also made a day-trip to the local mall to see how commerce works.
Our agriculture class made a trip to the Royal Easter Show, and members of the Rural Youth group (similar to the American 4-H) also got to stay for days at a time and lead animals in the big parades.
I was also in the Cadets from grade 9 (somewhat similar to ROTC), and we went on a whole bunch of trips, where we did hiking, climbing, repelling, shooting, etc.
Probably the most exotic trip available at our school was for the students who chose to study French. They got to go on a one-week visit to new Caledonia.
Only two stand out for me: The Los Angeles International Airport, where, IIRC, we actually got to board a Continental Airlines jetliner (although not go for a free plane ride, which I thought was very stingy of them), and the Bandini fertilizer plant in the City of Industry (unless it was the City of Commerce, or Santa Fe Springs – one of those towns), where each student attending went home with a little philodendron seedling in a sample of Bandini Black Magic potting soil.
And in the Cub Scouts, we toured a McDonald’s, where we learned that the potatoes for the fries were not so much peeled, as tumbled around in a sort of lapidary machine until most of the skins had been pounded off. And we all got a burger, fries and a shake at the end.
In high school, I accompanied the yearbook staff to the Los Angeles Times printing plant, followed by a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum of Natural History.
I grew up in Northern NJ, and went to Ellis Island six fckin’ times.*
I no longer give a damn about those huddled masses, yearning to break free. Especially when I can specifically remember that over the years the price of a little cheeseburger went up from $1.50 to $5.50, while the stock chochkies in the crappy gift shop never rotated.
Seriously, the first time was cool. The second time was another treat. The third, I wanted to see something new. The fourth, I wanted to jump in the damn bay. The fifth, I damn near got suspended because I was so obnoxious (I did everything except pay attention). The sixth, I left the ‘tour group’ (my family).
I did a lot of other side field trips, but none compare in absolute suck as my five-peat of that damned boring place.
Tripler
New York, you want it? Have it! :mad:
Oh, also, I went to a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Tacoma Actor’s Guild in middle school, and to the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma several times in elementary and middle schools. (that’s in addition to the one I was thinking of in my first post, which is near Capital Campus) And I think I visited Kennedy Creek to see the salmon spawning during freshman high school science, but I know I did it later with family so I’m a bit unsure.
(You’d think I’d be able to remember these all at once; middle school was fall 2000-spring 2002.)
I wonder if MGM was like CLUE. I was in CLUE and we had great field trips relevant to what we were studying at the time. We went to Gulf Shores for Oceanography, Alabama Space Station for astronomy, some caves I can’t remember because it’s been dang near 30 years for spelunking, Chucalissa village when we were studying early US history.
Regular school field trips not with CLUE were mundane and boring. The Pink Palace Museum, the zoo and some carnival from what I can recall.
I grew up in New England, so standard trips for me were:
- Hampton Beach, NH
- Willard Clock Museum(which was a 5 minute walk from my house)
- Olde Sturbridge Village
- Parker Brothers- so cool -we would get to pick a free game out at the end! I toured it 2 times, got Laverne & Shirley game first time, then Scan. So sad it’s gone now.
- A Maple Sugar Camp - got to see maple sugar & syrup made, bought lots of rock candy
6)Boston Museum of Science - New England Aquarium
- Southwick Zoo
- Higgins Armory Museum
- A fishery
- A water treatment plant
Those were the field trips. Of course, class trips included trips to Canobie Lake Park and other tourist attractions.
I can’t remember ever taking one in Canada (elementary school years) except for a cabane a sucre type deal once. But I went to the equivalent of a one-room school house up there (combined grades, about 6 children per grade) and my parents pulled us out whenever my dad was assigned out of Canada for more than 3 months, so I might have missed some.
But we had long recesses and winter was a blast
In the US:
Boston symphony
Boston museum of art
Lowell mill
Peabody Museum
Science museum
Children’s museum
Boston freedom trail/state house/etc
New York City
Science field trip to the shore to collect samples/demonstrate how rivers meet oceans
Red Sox Game (statistics in 6th grade…Roger Clemens was still pitching for them at that point)
Those are the ones I remember well. There may have been others but I don’t remember them.
Gee I forgot some:
US Space and Rocket Center (Huntsville, AL)
American Museum of Science and Energy (Oak Ridge, TN)
Martha Berry Museum
Chief Vann House
Fouth Grade was Wisconsin History / Geography year. The only geography trip I remember was Kettle Morraine, but we visited to several historic places
Wade House
Grignon Home
Old World Wisconsin
Hertitage Hill
Brian