I Need To Know More About Kristen Bell & Dax Shepard Getting Stranded At The Airport

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard got stranded at Boston’s Logan International Airport recently and, like just about everything these two do, the whole ordeal was full of charming, goofy moments of haplessly earnest relatability. But... I will say I have so many questions about how this all went down. Questions like “Could Anna of Arendelle truly be subjected to this?” and “$600 for neck pillows and blankets? Really?” and “ONE toothbrush?” I promise: all these questions make sense in context.

The ordeal was captured on Bell’s Instagram Stories, pictures and a video accompanied by a written explanation. “Stranded at the Boston Airport,” The Good Place star’s posts began. “9 hours of delays and... even though @uno was helping pass the time... and playing spades of course... We made quite a home here... There were no hotels available within 50 miles…”

Shepard augmented the scene with a video showing the family set-up, which seems to have been mainly crafted by Bell... whose bum he zooms in on at the beginning of the video, because even with a stressful, 9-hour delay and the prospect of sleeping on an airport floor, men are gonna men. (No shade, really: my husband would do the exact same thing. There’s apparently one straight man in this world and a lot of us are married to him.)

Meanwhile, Bell is mom-ing hard (give me a more “mom” scenario than setting up a cozy little nest in a crisis, you can’t) by arranging a “bedroom” between bench chairs.

“How much money have you spent on blankets and neck pillows?” she asks in a later moment of the video Shepard posted, once she’s got control of the camera.

“$350, but then you went and spent a little bit more,” he replies.

They calculate that between the two they’d spent about $600 to stay at the airport. “It could have been a really nice hotel,” Shepard muses. But one place where they saved money?

“I decided to just buy one toothbrush for the whole family to share,” Shepard notes, acknowledging the irony of skimping on such a cheap item. But honestly? Such a dad move. Like... it’s nonsense but very real nonsense that I have no doubt my husband, father, grandfather, and every one of my uncles and dad-friends would do. (See again my One Straight Man theory.)

But the oasis within Logan International Airport was short-lived.

“We wanted to stay but we were kicked out...” Bell’s Instagram Story continued. “And had to find a place to stay right AFTER Dad had taken his sleep aids.”

“Thankfully we found friends of friends who offered us their attics and accepted us at 1 a.m. And then took us on a hike the next morning with a lot of dogs and it was heaven. THANK U JOHN & KRISTA!!!!!”

So that’s the story, but questions remain. Like... Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard fly commercial? Did they not have access to an airport lounge? There was no way for Frozen’s Kristen Bell or Armchair Expert’s Dax Shepard to pull some strings and get a hotel room in Boston? Did Bell even attempt singing “For The First Time In Forever” to convince someone to either let her stay or get a room somewhere? Surely there’s some higher up whose daughter would have wanted to FaceTime with Anna in exchange for a hotel room...

And then there are their hereos: John and Krista. What on Earth was their reaction when a friend called them and was like “Hey, A-list celebrity family Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are coming to your house with their kids and friends. Is that cool?”

Ultimately, this was a classic case of “all’s well that ends well,” and I’m glad it turned into kind of a cute family story, even if some of my most burning questions remain...