Hey everybody I'm Kim Holderness and I'm Pen Holderness. Welcome to the Holderness Family podcast. Good to see you honey. Face to face. Face to face. Do you feel like sometimes we just live life going? We we literally work together every day. I've passed you on the road. 14 times this week as you've gone in one direction. Now we did think that we were going to have a little less carpooling at this point in our lives. Right. But.

Lola's driver's license appointment has been delayed not not her fault. No no no there weird rules in North Carolina right now so but she she's on track to get her license in another month or two but can I be honest. I you're okay with it celebrated. And she did she was fine with it. She's she's totally fine. It'd be like another it's like an extra month because of some weird COVID rules and everything. I know that that is the best quality time I have with her except for the trip we just took which we're going to talk about.

You don't get a lot of you don't get a captive audience with your kid much when they are 16 years old which is the most natural thing ever because she she has we could at request from her even people have requested us on Instagram. I'm like I'm not going to send my daughter to a stranger's house to babysit yeah she would she loves kids but when would she have time. She has a more active social life than either one of us and then she volunteers and is on teen boards and things like that so well she's trying to get into college and you remember.

Those days there's a lot of stuff that you end up doing plus your friends all have cars so there's the social side of it. The bottom line is we're just not seeing as much of our teenagers as we normally do for that reason.

We were very well I don't know about excited we were very adamant about doing some sort of trip together because for the first time in four years our kids had the same like break during the winter where we could all just go somewhere.

Yeah and I mean not to get I mean nobody likes looking at other people's photo albums from a trip so we're not going to do that.

Is it going to smack you in the face with a bunch of pictures or were or even just go into extreme detail but I have to say there is a particular joy in some force family fun and our our kids hate it when we say that.

But force family fun I feel like it's one of those things where you're like hey kids let's go on a hike and they're like oh but then at the end of the day they love it.

In the case it was the reverse I was the one that needed to be convinced because we I had made a New Year's resolution to get out of my comfort zone and this trip was so far past my comfort zone and some really cool things happened.

Do you do you feel like it's more in your comfort zone now that you're finished with it.

Right it totally it wasn't so hard it's like exposure therapy and I know that's a therapy for people with anxiety you just explode you know if you're afraid of elevators you go through in a particular way and you do it so yes absolutely.

So the title of today's podcast is forced family fun fun fact I wanted to call our board game that I thought it would be really funny to call our board game forced family fun but our kids were like no one will ever buy that it's a it's a it's a good point Lola no one would ever buy that but we do believe in forced family fun.

In Kim's point a hike is a good example. When it comes to vacations in our family I do the planning and I'm here's the reason why Kim does everything else Kim does most of the planning Kim does groceries she does children schedules she does workouts for us she plans those she schedules house maintenance and yard work she is the best when it comes to this.

And you deserve a break right so we talk about this trip and you said honey you got this so I planned this my one and only job is not to mess it up.

And this is going to sound like a cop out coming from me but I have discovered something over the last years when it comes to planning a vacation ready for this you don't want to plan a perfect vacation.

You don't want a vacation where everything is figured out for you and every where you look everything is perfect everything is comfortable with a family vacation I don't believe that that's as important as shared experiences and maybe some adventures so we're going to talk today about the vacation that we had a couple of but not an adu she look at my photos way you made that very clear we don't have the ability to show photos so I think we're okay Kim's guys Kim is very concerned.

That we're going to be bragging about our vacation that's not what we're doing.

It's not like that.

No so again I think the I get it honey do you want to get it out.

We're going to talk about why sharing and shared experience are sometimes more powerful than just those relaxing vacations and also we're going to add on to that what we learned from the amazing race that really helped us plan and give a similar experience to you.

I'm not talking about the obvious stuff from the amazing race we didn't give them a million dollars opposite opposite.

Yeah and people people had asked when we were sharing an Instagram and Instagram stories we were doing oh is this one of the trips you wanted amazing race no we actually took neither one of those trips we want to trip to keep

...