By the time you’re reading this, I will have returned from a trip of a lifetime.

If all went as planned, I got home last night from my family’s journey to that magical place in Florida. No, not the golf courses. And no, not the place where they count election ballots.

We went to Disney World. This column is being written on the assumption I survived it.

In the weeks before we departed, plenty of people gave me a knowing look when I told them our destination. They suggested I would need a vacation once I returned. It was, they attempted to tell me, a trip, not a vacation.

But as they described their experiences at Disney World, they all ended up with smiles on their faces and vivid memories of time with their families. In my book, there’s plenty of time for vacations. I’ll take as many trips as I can before my boys grow up and move on to lives of their own.

We waited until our boys were 10 and 7 to venture into Walt Disney’s world of imagination because we wanted them to be old enough to remember it. It also helped to have extra time to save up for it. We were thankful for the opportunity to go.

Because of the deadlines necessary to keep the pages flowing at the paper, I naturally had to fi le this before my trip was done. But we’ve taken in a couple of days so far, and I’ve never seen such a wild collection of hairy, comical, tall, short, fat, skinny, strange and beautiful characters squeezed into one place, and that was just on the airplane trip down to Florida.

I couldn’t help fi nding some comfort as I looked around our airplane in the fact that my boys are beyond the stage of booster seats, strollers and an inability to pop their ears as the plane ascends or descends. I played cards with one of the boys — he’s a tough Texas Hold’em competitor — but in the two-hour fl ight, my wife and I actually got a chance just kick back and relax. I even read part of an Abraham Lincoln biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A great start to any trip.

By now, we’ve experienced the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. One boy and I, joined by a family friend there with us, rode the Space Mountain roller coaster three times. How can anyone say that’s not a rockin’ vacation?

But I understand what people say about a trip like this being a strain. Each and every day, one kid or another took the lead on a ride toward a not-so-magical destination: the last nerve in my body. Sometime it was a slow-moving boat ride on which I could almost predict where we were headed but wasn’t too sure when we’d get there. Other times it was a fast-paced adventure with lots of ups and downs that took a surprising turn into the “if you do that one more time” hairpin turn.

It was easy to see plenty of other parents were on the same ride. I saw several pulling their children quickly aside for motivational chats, clearly aggravated by the thankfully temporary moments when the children celebrated in this world of imagination demonstrated a complete lack of gratitude for the small fortunes invested in their fun. At these prices, some parents appeared to suggest, nobody gets to whine. Have fun, kids, or else!

But mostly, we all just tried our best to enjoy the fact we were spending a few days together in a place of adventure.

There were moments of parental satisfaction, such as when I dragged my oldest into the Hall of Presidents. It’s a show in which all the presidents appear in realistic robotic forms as part of a presentation about our nation’s history. I went to it 39 years ago not long after it first opened with my parents, and it left a real impression. After it was all over this time, my boy had a smile on his face and said “Thanks, Dad, for making me go to that. It was cool.”

So OK, maybe that admission price isn’t looking so bad after all.