16 Feb Field Tripping With Bathrooms
What is your earliest upsetting moment? When you go back in memory to try and think of the first time you remember feeling like you’d choose to curl up and disappear, what enters your mind? Maybe it takes you completely back to when you were six, headed out for a field trip with the entire first grade.
Field trip days are thrilling days, because you’re leaving the school and won’t have to do schoolwork. Instead, 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 a cool day at the zoo.
On the hour drive north, you try not to keep an eye on the fact that buses always make you feel slightly queasy. Actually, you chat with your neighbor, wonder what you got in your sack lunch, and before you find out it, you’ve gotten there.
You invest the next couple of hours walking around and seeing the various 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.
Soon after eating, you head to the far edge of the zoo where the bears and lions are, spend time 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 get back on the bus and head for home.
Just then, your eye catches on something totally magical. 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 exchange for one of those miraculous bunches of total sugar gluttony.
You start eating it and enjoy the phenomenon of the way it melts in your mouth in a completely delightful way, every time. And, before you know it, the teachers are saying it’s time to load the buses.
All is going really good … 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 experiencing like a roller coaster and it isn’t calming down. And then it dawns on you, a thought almost worse than the physical irritation of feeling nauseated: Supposing I can’t make it back to the school?
You make it. You do. You literally hear the bell ring announcing the end of the day as the bus arrives 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 speak of that you were at the very front of the bus? Besides being dealt with in yuck, smelling disgusting, and finally feeling a little relief because it’s out (phew!), you feel unusual. Total awkwardness. Total humiliation. Total wishing you could just curl up and disappear so everyone wouldn’t have to see you as they file past and exit the bus. (Why, oh why, couldn’t you have been sitting at the back?!).
Maybe this isn’t your story, but it illustrates something we think makes motorcoaches ideal for school groups. The entire episode recounted above could have been avoided 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, despite the fact that they didn’t have to go before you left on the field trip.
Next time you’re finalizing the details for an upcoming field trip with elementary kids, give a motorcoach a try. See what convenient, affordable, friendly, professional customer service looks like!