LONDON — We rode the Midland train this morning about twenty miles north of London to the beautiful English village of Berkhamsted, home of our friends Elizabeth and Rob, and their two young sons, Ben, 5 and Joe, 2. They met us at the train station and drove us out to a wooded park that was busy with families–with scores of kids and dogs–romping on a crisp, sunny March morning under a bluebell sky.

I tucked into a full English breakfast–eggs, sausage, tomatoes, toast and beans–while the rest of the family showed slightly more restraint. When I went back for coffee, I met a local man with a good-sized English lab, a chocolate, and struck up a conversation while I petted his dog and missed our Pippy. His chocolate, named Zack, was a mid-sized male. When he asked me about Pippy, I confessed that she weighed close to 80 pounds. “That’s quite a big girl,” he declared. Well, yes. Full English, is the term, I suppose.

The boys soon locked on to Will, and he to them, and once we left the table they were right on Will’s rather large heels. (We first met Elizabeth and Rob when Will was 5, Ben’s age, so it was amazing to see how fast time goes for children, while it seems like just yesterday for us.) As we walked across a grassy meadow to a well-beaten trail through the woods, I started an argument with Ben about whose shadow on the grass was whose. He was pretty insistent that the smaller of the two shadows was his, no matter what I argued. “That’s mine, I know it is,” he said.

Will climbed the stairs on a tall columnar monument next to the cafe, and when he came down the young boys had caught the climbing bug. They kept after Will to help them climb the fallen beech trees in the woods. With his arms raised high, two-year-old Joe begged Will to help him up on a fallen log. “We’ve already done it twice,” Will pointed out. Again, again. And again. We hiked for about an hour and a half after breakfast, and with all the climbing, made it about four hundred yards through the woods. The boys were adorable.

Afterwards, we drove to their home on a steep hill overlooking Berkhamsted, a town of about 25,000 people. Rob’s childhood hometown, it was charming, rural, and felt more than a half-hour ride from London. On the surface picturesque and peaceful, bits of its history kept popping up in conversation. Oh yes, Graham Greene was from Berkhamsted and set some of his novels here. That former monastery over there — the one where Rob once bartended — that was the manor house of a man who developed many of the canals in England. The ruined castle? A favorite of Edward the Black Prince (1330-76). And then there was that siege in 1216 – you know, right after the barons forced King John into signing the Magna Carta, that thing that helped lead to our modern constitutional democracy — oh, yes, King Louis of France, backed by the barons, he laid successful siege here. More recently, more to today’s point, Ben and Joe were born here as well.

We shared tea and a chocolate cake that Ben had baked the previous day. It was every bit as good as — in fact better than — Fortnum and Mason’s, even though Ben only put in half the chocolate. While Joe, exhausted by all the climbing, struggled to take a nap, Ben trooped up and down the stairs fetching toys to bring down to play with Will. Courtenay went up with him once to see his bedroom, and as Ben showed her around, the five-year-old announced, “As you can see, I’m a very lucky boy.” Yes, indeed.

It was wonderful catching up with our friends, Rob’s job as a foreign news editor in London, and hearing about Elizabeth’s project to document motherhood through a series of amazing photos — check out #thesecretlifeofmothers and #bringinguptheboys for some unforgettable images. Stunning photographer and artist, Elizabeth is. We said our goodbyes, and Rob delivered us to the the ruins of the castle built in 1066 mentioned above that lie next to the train station. The castle belonged to the half brother of William the Conquerer. The remnants of the thousand-year-old stone walls are surrounded by rolling grasslands and a deep moat filled with cat tails and sedges.

On the train home, we met a young woman from Oklahoma State University who was returning from the Harry Potter Studios, which is our destination tomorrow. She described herself as a lifelong Harry Potter fan and confessed to being so excited about the tour of Harry Potter movie sets that she had “chills” the whole time.

We finished the day with a walk through London’s Hyde Park, which was packed with people jogging, boating, cycling, feeding the swans and enjoying the late-afternoon sunshine. We swung through Harrods, the over-the-top department store in Knightsbridge, where we saw the memorial to Lady Diana and bought meat pies and pieces of cheesecake for tomorrow night’s dinner when we return from Harry Potter.

As Ben would surely agree, we are very lucky boys and girls.