Kristen Bell found a way to keep her daughters safe and entertained during a recent vacation.
Over the summer, the Nobody Wants This actress joined her husband, Dax Shepard, and their two daughters Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9, for a family trip to Denmark.
“We try to travel with the kids every summer somewhere where we just say we’re going to pick a place on the globe and we’re not going to know the language, we’re not going to know the smells, we’re not going to know what the food is like,” Bell, 44, shared on the Thursday, September 19, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “We’re just going to see how other people live and we’ll observe.”
Before heading to Iceland and Norway, the family of four stopped in Denmark. While enjoying the “coolest” country, Bell realized that “going on vacation as a parent is not a vacation. You’re just watching your kids in a different city.”
When speaking with host Kimmel, however, Bell said she found a way to enjoy some kid-free time.
“The hack is when we went to Copenhagen, we stayed at this hotel that was right at Tivoli Gardens, which is like a 7-acre theme park. It’s an old one,” she said. “The hotel opens up into the theme park and so we just were kind of like, ‘Are we going to free-range parenting and roll the die here?’ They woke up at, like, 6 every morning. They scanned their bracelets to go outside. [We] didn’t see them for seven hours. Just running around Copenhagen.”
When Kimmel, 56, asked if “that was OK,” Bell laughed and confirmed everyone returned home to the United States alive.
“It was heaven,” she said. “We just had coffee. We played Spades, and then around 3, we’d be like, ‘Anybody see them?’ And then one of them would run up and need a Band-Aid or whatever.”
Things were a little less daring earlier in the summer when Bell was able to travel with her family to Idaho with Kimmel and his closest friends.
Instead of exploring theme parks with rides and attractions, Bell and her crew experienced some calmer activities.
“It’s sort of a family vacation in Idaho and normally it’s pretty serene with a lot of fishing, but this year was off the hook,” she said. “There was a lot of dancing. My favorite was the silent disco. I love it.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs on ABC weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET.
