Disney World at 50-Something: They Don't Warn You About the Feet

I want to start by saying: Disney World is magic. It is genuinely, actually magic. I do not care how old you are. You walk through those gates and something in your chest does a thing that you did not plan for and cannot fully explain.

I also want to say: nobody warned me about the feet.

The parks are enormous. I knew this intellectually. I did not know it with my body until I had been walking for four hours and my feet staged a formal revolt near the Haunted Mansion. They did not quit — they filed grievances. There is a difference. They filed grievances loudly.

My daughter was magnificent. She had the Disney app. She had the lightning lane strategy. She had a list of what we were hitting first based on wait times. I looked at her in the planning phase of this trip and thought: she is going to be fine in this world. A teenager with a spreadsheet strategy for a theme park is a teenager who is going to handle her life.

We rode everything she wanted to ride. I rode things that my body was not designed for anymore and I did not say a word about it in the moment because her face — her absolute joy on those rides — is something I want to keep forever. I said things about it later, in the hotel room, while applying whatever was in the first aid kit to my dignity.

We watched the fireworks from a spot she had scouted out earlier in the day. Standing there in the dark with thousands of strangers, lights exploding over Cinderella's Castle, my daughter leaning slightly against my shoulder — I thought about how much we have been through to stand here. The hard years, the fear years, the years when joy felt very far away. And here we were. Standing in the happiest place on earth on purpose, having driven eighteen hundred miles to get there on purpose.

God puts the good days in to remind you. So you have something to look at when the hard days come.

The feet survived. Barely, but they survived. The foot massager in the hotel room saw two days of very serious overtime and earned a raise.

Buckle up, buttercup. The magic is real and the feet are temporary. Go.