Travelling with your grown-up kids is trending - a trip to Lego House in Denmark with my 20-year-old showed me why

A new trend is emerging among mothers in their late forties, like me. Our kids may have flown the nest, but as grown-ups, these modern adults (let's call them moddlers...) are increasingly choosing to take road trips and have travel adventures with us - and not just because we're paying. Yup, Mums and Moddlers is a thing.

There was a time, in my house, when stepping on Lego in bare feet was a torture I endured daily. Back then, I remember reading Happier At Home by Gretchen Rubin, in which she wrote about cultivating a shrine, or the importance of giving prominence in your home to precious possessions. "A shrine is arranged with care," she wrote. "It entices people to particular activities and moods. It's a sign of dedication."

Soon afterwards, greeted by the sight of piles of Lego bricks strewn across the living room floor, I decided to stop endlessly decluttering and complaining about the mess and start seeing it differently. Those little piles of bricks were a shrine to my children’s creativity that I would one day miss.

But those days are long gone, and now I can’t remember the last time I stepped on a LEGO brick. The old creations sit untouched, gathering dust on a shelf in a bedroom rarely occupied by my oldest LEGO-loving child, who is away at university.

It’s the ultimate cliche to say that the quietness of an empty nest can take your breath away, but it’s true - I never expected to miss the bricks or the unmistakable sound of a bucket of LEGO being tipped onto the floor.

So when I received an invitation to visit LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, I knew immediately who my plus-one would be. This trip, I suspected, might be the perfect way to connect with my son, now that he’s busy forging a life of his own.

I’ve noticed a trend emerging among my friends whereby taking a holiday or road trip with your adult child is no longer seen as odd but rather the modern way to keep the family connections alive once kids start flying the coop.

I think the mother-and-son duo, Tom and Caroline Bridge, winning Race Across the World tapped into something universal: that longing that many empty-nesters feel to hold onto our adult kids at the same time as not wanting to hold them back. And now, with Anita Rani and her father set to join the celebrity edition of the show, it seems the parent-child travel renaissance is officially a thing.

I understand why. Taking a trip as a parent and adult child is like a factory reset for your family dynamic. It’s not obvious who’s in charge, negotiations happen around which route to take rather than what time to go to bed, and there’s something lovely about experiencing your child in a whole new context, without the constraints of the parent/child patterns that so many of us fall back into the moment our kids come home, no matter how short the visit. Travelling together is all about meeting on neutral ground and seeing one another with the fresh perspective that shared adventure brings.

LEGO House was the perfect destination for our trip; it’s the ultimate shrine to creativity, after all, and designed to inspire all ages. Situated in Billund, Denmark - the birthplace of the LEGO brick - it’s set over 12,000m² and filled with more than 25 million LEGO bricks. We were invited to attend the launch of its most immersive experience yet: the brand-new LEGO Masters Academy, a one-of-a-kind brick building adventure inspired by the global TV phenomenon.

The Academy is tailored to different ages and abilities. Level two sessions welcome children from five years up, while level three is designed for older kids aged ten and above. (A simplified starter program - level one - is coming soon, and the team is already working on ideas for a level four that will be much more in-depth, stretching over a full or half day.) It turns out level two was perfectly pitched for my own LEGO building skills, which are woefully underdeveloped for someone whose bank balance has been so depleted by boxes of the stuff over the years.

Inside a studio space styled like the LEGO Masters TV set - with dramatic lighting and an entire rainbow of brick bins lining the walls - we learned proper building techniques, from stacking (the classic way of building) to tiling (using flat pieces to cover exposed studs for a neater finish). I even learned about the LEGO Brick Separator (£3.49 at Amazon) - an ingenious tool for (you guessed it) disconnecting stuck bricks. As someone who is usually designated the ‘provider of bowls for sorting pieces’, I felt deeply proud of my LEGO character at the end of our session. And my son was so delighted to see me converted to the joys of LEGO at long last that he insisted on buying me my first ever set - the LEGO Botanicals Happy Plants (£17.99, Amazon). I adore it.

That’s music to the ears of Søren Bering Andersen, Head of Experience at LEGO House. “The takeaway is the most important part,” he says. “If people go away proud of what they created, whether they’re a kid or an adult, that’s gold. That pride in creation - that’s what we want them to feel here.”

At the Academy, wonderfully engaging hosts (known as LEGO play agents) keep the atmosphere fun and pressure-free, cleverly reading the room so that everyone builds at the pace that suits them. “That’s really the secret sauce,” agrees Bering Andersen. “The hosts make everyone comfortable. They get everyone involved.”

At other zones at LEGO House, what you build must stay behind, but Academy guests may take their finished creations home. “That’s something I’m really proud of,” he adds. “You learn techniques, then you can redo them, you can try again - and you have that memory to take away with you.”

Søren Bering Andersen

“It’s something we always dreamed of adding,” he says of the new Lego Masters Academy experience. “When Kjeld (that’s Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, Former CEO and President of the LEGO Group and grandson of LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen) first had the idea for LEGO House, he wanted to do something like this. We’re super happy we can do it now.”

Ultimately, the LEGO Master Academy is about much more than learning building techniques from experts. It’s about families of all ages coming together to create memories, as well as masterpieces. “The experience is designed for kids, but it’s just as much for adults - it’s primarily designed for families to spend time doing something together," adds Bering Andersen. You could do that by going to see a historical monument, he points out, but he's a fan of making memories through doing something together. "You can do that here," he says. "I am also responsible for the post Lego House experience, and it’s my ambition that you never forget being here.”

Whilst there, we even squeezed in lunch at Mini Chef, where you must use actual LEGO pieces to place your order and your meal - served inside a giant LEGO brick - is handed to you by charming LEGO robots. It’s impossible not to smile throughout the experience, even with only adults on our table.

As we walked through LEGO House together, I was struck by the realisation that my son is as much the wide-eyed brick fanatic he ever was, but now also a calm, reliable travel buddy whose company and humour made the whole trip more fun.

Perhaps that’s the real appeal of travelling with an adult child - the fact that the journey echoes the one you’ve already taken together in life. You’ve navigated the highs and lows of childhood and adolescence, bound by the shared joys and challenges of the parent/child relationship. When they grow up, nobody tells you what comes next or how to continue developing your relationship. But when you take a trip with your grown-up child, you get to experience them as the world does. And that, I am finding, is by far one of the richest and most rewarding parts of parenthood.

Our 'Mums and Moddlers' trip reinforced for me that everything and nothing has changed. My son chats about physics and philosophy like he used to chat about Minecraft and Star Wars, and I smile and pretend I understand a word. I play along, a little reluctantly, with my designated role of slightly-technologically-incapable elder, and he exhibits a weary patience while explaining - yet again - how to activate night shift on my phone, whether or not I want to know. (I decided not to point out that I got my first iPhone when he was three years old.) One minute, he’s asking me how much I know about quantum mechanics, and the next, he’s asking me how much money is too much to spend in the on-site LEGO store. He still builds. I still admire his creativity and clean up his empty LEGO packaging. In fact, I’m almost tempted to propose that we make this trip an annual thing.

If you’re a post-nest parent who longs for more connection with your grown-up child, I recommend proposing a weekend trip together. It doesn’t have to be LEGO House, of course, although I can’t recommend it enough if LEGO has played a part in your parent-child history. too. Why not visit a city you’ve always wanted to explore, or recreate a trip from their childhood? The destination isn’t really that important. What matters is carving out space for connection, without fixed expectations.

Oh, but do pack tissues. I can almost guarantee you’ll have a moment when having a travel adventure with your adult child will suddenly hit you in the feels. Mine came as I was packing up to leave our accommodation. For the first time in many, many years, I stepped on a tiny Lego lantern in bare feet. My goodness, that hurt so much more than I expected.

If you’re tempted by a Mums and Moddlers trip , here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Talk honestly about your intentions. I tried to back out of this trip several times as I was worried my son didn't really want to go. Turns out he really did. We laughed about this on the flight home, but a simple conversation would have made the planning process more relaxed.
• Let them lead. Traditional parenting boundaries get blurry on a Mums and Moddlers trip, so decisions like who should book the Uber and where you should eat dinner can get confusing quickly - invite them to co-plan the trip or assume responsibility for a particular aspect of it, like transport or food.
• Be cool. Remember when they brought teenage friends home and asked if you could not be too cringe? Still applies. It’s easy to get giddy with delight when your adult kid chooses to hang out with you. Don’t ruin it by being too extra.
• Allow for time apart. Travelling with others can be intense. Especially with a person that you actually created. Don’t try to fill every hour and make sure you have plenty of space apart to snooze, scroll or just recharge your batteries.
• Don’t overparent. On his first visit home from University, which most post-nest parents will agree is usually fraught, my son declared us equals during a tense exchange. Since I was still paying his phone bill, I asked when he’d start paying mine to better reflect our equal status. Neither of us has used those lines since, and they’re best avoided on a Mums and Moddlers trip, where treating each other respectfully as independent adults is key.
• Don't forget you're also an adult. Don't revert to childishness just because you're no longer the only responsible adult in the room. Our flights were horribly delayed, so I splashed out on executive lounge access, but while I was soon three glasses of wine down and begging my son to play with me, he was committed to using the quiet space to catch up on university work while sipping on mint tea. Snatching his phone and texting his friends to complain about him seemed like hilarious revenge, at the time, for when he was a kid and replied to an important work email on my laptop with 'You're a poop'. But whereas the recipient of the poop email is long since gone from my life, I may yet have to face his friends in future. (Sorry, Alice.)
• Make space for nostalgia. If you can, I recommend visiting somewhere that pays homage to their childhood in some way (hello, Lego House), but don’t over-egg the trip down memory lane - balance it with plenty of space for grown-up fun too.