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[quote=Anonymous]When I was 15, in the summer of 1982, I went on a youth group tour of the US.  We were 40 high school students, mostly didn't know each other; we all traveled on one bus, with 10 tents, 4 stoves, and 5 chaperones (plus the driver).

We drove for 5 weeks across the US, mostly camping in state and national parks as I recall.

Of course we had no cell phones back then.  We mailed letters home every so often, and once or twice, made a collect call from a pay phone.   Our parents were given a list of mail stops -- a post office that would collect letters for us and allow us to pick them up.  My mom sent a letter every week to me.

Every few days we'd come to a new town.  The bus would drive into the downtown area and dump us 40 teens off and they told us to explore, and come back by 4 PM so we had time to get to the campsite and cook dinner!   No cell phones -- honestly I have ABSOLUTELY no idea what the plan was if we got injured, lost etc.   I think maybe we had an emergency phone number to call the office that was in charge of the trip?  We were told to stick with the buddy system.  I do remember waiting a couple of hours once for some kids that got lost...

The amount of freedom we had back then, in hindsight, is incredible.  But it felt totally normal to me at the time.

It was a great trip.  Every three days they handed us $40 or so in our group of 10 "cooking group" and we went to a grocery store and bought meals for three days.  It was a tiny amount of money for 10 hungry kids - we were pretty starving all the time!!  We had to cook whatever we wanted on the camp stoves.  It was a lot of pasta and cereal![/quote]

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