School Field Trips From My Childhood: Eighth Grade

Tweet

In 8th grade my class had quite a few field trips, most of which had to do with local government or local history. In the fall we went up to Donner Summit, the infamous place where the Donner Party got trapped during the winter while trying to make it through the Sierra Nevada, and had to resort to cannibalism. It was snowy up in the mountains and I hadn't seen snow since I was in kindergarten. I remember the night before I had pierced my ears (myself) a fourth time and my ears were hurting the higher we went into the mountains, and I was worried that I would have to tell my mom my ears were hurting once we got back and she would discover I had another piercing. (She didn't care, surprisingly. I had already triple pierced my ears the year before and she was just like "again?") Anyway our class had to watch some videos about the Donner Party and then we took a hike through the area where they had camped out during the winter. There were signs marking the spots where their camps were at. It was a bit creepy knowing that we were walking through the place where cannibalism had taken place. On the way back home, we stopped at a ski lodge and got out of the bus to play in the snow for a bit, and this boy I sort of had a crush on hit me smack in the face with a snowball. I don't think I cared for him too much after that. There was a big 8th grade class field trip to the state capitol that year, and I got in trouble for giving lip to some congressman who was giving our class a lecture in this auditorium-like room at the capitol. My friend Shanesta and I kept mocking him from up in the bleachers, and he finally called us out for it, and I don’t remember how I responded but I remember I was rude. I had no respect for suits at the capitol. (To be fair the guy came across as an arrogant jerk, and my friends and I were poor kids who couldn’t stomach the crap he was spouting.) After we finished our tour at the capitol, we got to wander around Old Sac, and that’s where I first met my friend Hilary, right after she got busted for shoplifting from a candy shop. I don’t remember what the reasoning was, but for some reason the following day she got switched to my class because of that incident, and she got sat next to me, and we became good friends, although I never condoned her shoplifting. A lot of my friends in 8th grade shoplifted, but I would always leave if they insisted on doing it (I usually tried to talk them out of it. I was poor but I wasn’t a thief.) I was still in orchestra that year and we got to perform at a local old folks' home right before Christmas. The old people were sweet, and one little old lady kept following us around saying "I love you." They baked us cookies and we ate a lot of cookies, as they kept shoving them at us. Another field trip my class went on was to the Old Historical Marysville Cemetery, which is usually closed off to the public. We did a scavenger hunt to find names on certain graves. It had been raining a lot the week of the field trip, and the ground was muddy. I was standing in front of one large headstone looking at the name on it when all of a sudden my foot sunk into the ground up to my calf. My friends screamed and took off running, leaving me to dig myself out of the mud. They thought a zombie had grabbed me and had left me for a goner. I thought it was hilarious, but was also ticked off that they would just leave me like that and not even try to help me! We went to Great America toward the end of the year. I wouldn't have been able to go if not for the class fund that we had saved for that purpose (paying for students who didn't have the money to be able to go on field trips.) But it was not meant to be a completely enjoyable field trip. We were given this worksheet of science problems and we were supposed to find the solutions throughout the day; for example, what was the velocity of a certain roller coaster, and blah blah blah...I didn't do a single problem on that worksheet and got a big fat F on it. By that point I didn't care. I did have a fun time riding the roller coasters. The last week of school we got to go to the carnival the high school senior class was hosting for grad night. Spent the day riding rides and fighting with my friend Shanesta, who was jealous that I was hanging out with Alyson, who had gone to a different middle school. Shanesta was rather fat and she didn't fit into the Tilt-o-whirl cart with us, but she crammed herself in anyway and the three of us were squished in there and our cart barely spun around. By the end of the day I think I had made up with Shanesta, although she knew I wasn't going to hang out with her in high school if she continued to hang out with her brother's crowd who did (and sold) drugs, which she did. We didn't hang out much after that day, or rather once we graduated from the 8th grade. After 8th grade I went to high school and we never went on any field trips after that. (Thanks to @Courtlynn for the inspiration for this post series.)