> Gri"anyone else have a good senior trip story to tell? I'm sure Kiki will when she returns"shny

:p Lucky. Our 'senior trip' was one day. No overnight. Of course, the no overnight was wholly the fault of the senior class that came before us, who generally ransacked and destroyed the place, making the school administrators fear for all time. Grrr. The senior trip was fun, but nothing very interesting for people outside of the school.

I have a good school trip story to tell though! The school I went to while my family was living in Holland, the American School of the Hague, had a thing they did called 'Project'. Project was a special kind of fun, extended field trip that happened in each grade from 5th up. The coolness factor of Project increases as your grade increases, from a long fun day trip in 5th grade to a week in Switzerland in 12th grade. Everybody in that grade (usually about 40 people max... it was a small school, with about 800 people all the way from Pre-K to 12th grade), plus teachers and parent voulunteers, would go on Project.

The first (and only, as we moved the year after) time I went on Project was in the 6th grade. It was a 3 day trip, with overnights, to Friesland. Friesland is one of the provinces of Holland; specifically, it is the northernmost province. It's in the northeast of the country, with Germany on the east, the rest of Holland to the south, and the North Sea on the west and north.

We piled into our school bus - only one bus, as I remember. All our school buses were actually tour buses, by the way, with plushy seats. I forever detest American school buses because of having a tour bus be my idea of a school bus for five years. Anyway, it took about 4 hours to get up to where we were staying, which was a youth hostel up in Friesland. It was right on the shores of a very wide canal, which in turn fed into the North Sea about 20 minutes away. (The part of the North Sea it went into was the part now commonly called the Ijsselmeer, which is bordered by mainland Holland on three sides and by the Frisian Islands on the north.)

It was a ruling trip. I don't remember completely what I did, since it was a long time ago, but there are several things I remember very well. The main thing was sailing. We went out on the Ijsselmeer for one day in sailboats... little Dutch sailboats. They have these little flipper-looking things on the side.... I'll see if I can find a picture for reference. They had no motors, just sails. There was one BIG sailboat, able to hold all of us at once, and about 10 little sailboats that could hold 4-5 people each. Each little boat had a teacher or parent that KNEW about sailing to help us.

That was so fun. I learned that sailboats lean to one side, which scared the heck out of me at first (I thought we were going to tip over or something). We sailed all over the place. I got to steer for a while, and it was also my job to raise the little flipper-thingies on the side of the boat. We spent all day sailing.

Other things I remember are visiting some of the old towns nearby, kayaking out on the canal in front of the hostel, and learning how to bind books by hand. It was really neat.

Sosi"of course, coming back to the public school system after this kind of schooling was a major shock"qui