Field Trips, YIKES!

We took the 4th grade (about 90 kids) on a field trip to the Utah Museum of Natural History up at the Universtiy of Utah last week. It was an adventure to say the least. To start off the trip one of the teachers was sick so she didn't come, then 2 parents didn't even show up so we were already down 3 adults. We rearranged groups and were off for the drive from Ogden to the U, when we got to Bountiful the second bus started having problems and was only going 35 on the freeway. My bus had to pull over and wait for them so we could drive behind them just in case there was a problem. (Imagine taking a fully loaded bus that is already having problems, up that hill on 4th South. We were totally chugging!)
We finally got to the museum late and didn't get to eat lunch before we went in. We did have a really good time there. The picture below features the kid whose family eats pet rabbits (see the earlier post!) He's the one in the white coat. We spent some time in the museum then loaded the buses again to drive to a parking lot where we pulled out the lunches and ate on the buses since it was freezing. Then we started to drive home. I ended up on the broken bus and it seemed to be doing fine until we reached Kaysville, then we started doing 25 on the freeway and the bus pretty much died in Clearfield. We had to pull over and wait for another bus to come pick us up.

We had left late from the museum and driving slowly didn't help out either. Our school gets out at 2:30, but by the time we pulled over in Clearfield it was already 2:50. The other bus had left us to get most of the kids back (still about 20 minutes after school got out.) After waiting for the replacement bus and loading it up, we finally got back to the school at about 3:45. Needless to say it was a long day!