Kristen Bell, Dax Shepard let kids run around Danish theme park alone

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard recently let their kids off the leash — and the results were “heaven.”

This week, the Nobody Wants This star recalled leaving her kids Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9, to their own devices while vacationing in Denmark. “Don’t you find that going on vacation as a parent — it’s not a vacation, it’s just watching your kids in a different city?” Bell said in a late-night interview with Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel felt even stronger, replying, “It’s worse than being at home.”

Bell agreed. “Truly! Because they have none of their creature comforts, they’re asking you a thousand more questions than they normally do.” 

To combat their kids’ boredom, Bell and Shepard stayed at a hotel in Copenhagen adjoined to Tivoli Gardens, the historic 181-year-old amusement park that inspired Walt Disney to create Disneyland.

“The hotel opens up into the theme park, and so we just were kinda like, ‘Are we gonna [try] like free-range parenting and roll the die here?'” Bell recalled. “We let them wake up, they woke up at like six every morning, they scanned their bracelets to go outside — didn’t see them for seven hours. Just running around Copenhagen.”

Bell has no regrets about the decision. “It was heaven,” she said. “We had coffee, we played spades, and then around three we’d be like, ‘Anybody see them?,’ and then they’d run up and need a Band-Aid or whatever.”

The kids ended up just fine. “They’re both alive,” Bell joked. “They all returned home.”

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The actress said her family values travel because it diversifies their worldview. “We try to travel with the kids every summer, somewhere where we just say, ‘We’re gonna pick a place on the globe, and we’re not gonna know the language, we’re not gonna know what the smells are, we’re not gonna know what the food is like — we’re just gonna see how other people live and and we’re gonna observe,'” she said. “It’s kind of a great way to burst their bubble.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Bell and Kimmel discussed an unusual memory from their time at a silent disco together. “Your husband, Dax, danced a lot, which surprised me,” Kimmel said. “So much so that he was wearing the headphones and he sweated through the headphones to the extent where he said, ‘You’re gonna have to burn these. These are not good anymore.'”

Bell remembered the damage going beyond the headphones. “He danced so hard his shirt fell off!” she said. “Because he also thought he had to burn his shirt. He was completely saturated, to the point where there was no getting around the fact that he had to change his shirt. It would have been a cute bit of like, ‘Oh, your shirt’s coming off,’ but people were actually retreating from him on the dance floor, being like, ‘Why are you so wet?'”

Bell’s new rom-com series, Nobody Wants This, hits Netflix on Sept. 26.

Watch the full conversation between Bell and Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live above.