LONDON — It’s a few minutes after 10 o’clock on Sunday night and we’ve all just finished packing to come home. It will be a little sad to leave our lovely London flat behind, but we’re all eager to fly home and hug Pippy.

LONDON — Will slept until after 10 a.m., and we still managed to make it through the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery by 1:15 p.m. With a stop for breakfast of Cream Tea. Not that I am proud of this. But when you have a 12-year-old in tow, even a relatively patient one, it’s sometimes all you can do to make sure he has seen several dozen important works that will hopefully seep deep into his brain, like rainwater through gravel.

So he saw the skull in The Ambassadors, the evil pig stare of Thomas Cromwell, the forever battling troops in Ucello’s Battle of San Romano, Van Gogh’s electric yellow Sunflowers. Will particularly liked several small Raphael’s; I loved the Tudor portraits, especially of Cranmer and Wriosthesley; Rick loved a painting with a chubby cupid being bitten by bees, the Raphael, the Van Gogh. The boys lucked out that there was a strike of museum staff, so several large galleries were closed.

After a bit of shopping, Will scored a new jacket from the very British Topman, near Oxford Circle, which was insanely crowded. The sidewalks were packed a la Harajuku in Tokyo; we could hardly get back down into the Tube station. The only real benefit was we could join the mass of jaywalkers and defy the homicidal bus and cab drivers. Covent Garden, too, was a crazy mass of humanity and street performers, which creep Rick out. Kind of like clowns. Or mimes. We fled.

After shopping, we split up — Rick and Will to the Natural History Museum, and I to the Tate Britain. They loved the dinosaurs; I loved the Turners and the Pre-Raphaelites, especially the Ophelia of Millais. I had seen the painting many times in books on Shakespeare, but seeing it in person brought unexpected tears to my eyes. Something about the flowers, the bird, the faraway look in her eye, echoes of Hamlet, and also of Midsummer Night’s  Dream.

We managed to meet back up for dinner at the hotel. Good to be back together again!

LONDON — Today, the London Eye and a Thames Clipper jaunt to Greenwich, of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian. The weather was mostly clear today, so we rode the Eye to see the view. It was OK, but Will and Rick had already climbed St. Paul’s and the Monument, so they were used to the view and weren’t overly impressed. We then jumped on a commuter boat to Greenwich, a few miles downriver, where King Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth were born. After a meal in the riverside Trafalgar Tavern — where Dickens used to eat — that darn Dickens keeps showing up at our mealtimes — we headed up to the 17th century Royal Observatory, where Will and I straddled the Meridian, one leg in each hemisphere. We watched the ball drop above the hill observatory — as it has every day at 1 p.m. since the early 19th century so that seafarers could set their clocks for navigation.

We saw the development of the first time piece that made navigating longitude accurate and sailing much more safe. Carpenter and amateur clockmaker John Harrison took on the challenge in the 1700s and developed a series of four clocks — the first three large as a birdcage, the final one — and the successful design — a small and beautiful watch known as H4. It reminded me of Steve Jobs and the quest for the perfect design. Anyhow, I want an H4.

Rick then wanted us to go to the “Deer Park” at the far end of Greenwich Park, a former royal hunting ground on a high place overlooking London and the Thames and the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. A kind of Pearl District with Major Banks. We teased Rick as we walked, and he asserted that the deer park — which he claimed Rick Steves had called a “must-do” — would sure beat those boring paintings I wanted to see in the Queen’s House back down by the Thames. We walked and walked and walked and walked. Rick was hoping for a Nara-style friendly deer petting zoo experience, I think, but it was more like a bunch of mangy fallow deer behind barbed wire. A little English girl was squealing — “I saw a mouse! Or a rat! I’m not sure which!” when we arrived so that made it a little more exciting. We laughed all the way back through the sunshine to the Queen’s House, which turned out to have some AMAZING paintings, even Rick agreed. The 17th century house had been built for the wives of the Stuarts, and there were some iconic portraits of the Tudors and the Stuarts, as well as a famous Spanish Armada painting and many many others. The house itself, now a popular wedding venue, is famous for being the first perfect home designed by Inigo Jones in the Palladian Italian style.

We cruised through the Maritime Museum, which was designed for an age group we didn’t understand — toddlers? pensioners? both? — so we took the light rail and Tube back home to recuperate for dinner. A stroll down King’s Road to Rabbit, which had the cool woodsy vibe of Ned Ludd without the amazing food. The smoked trout with clotted cream was delicious, as was the mushroom ravioli, but all the “small bites” left Will hungry for a bagel with lox and creme brulé back at the hotel.

We rode home on our first London bus. We had the familiar Tube-vs-Taxi “discussion,” decided to walk, and then a bus pulled up alongside us — it was just like the Grateful Dead song — a bus came by and I got on, that’s where it all began — and we leaped on. It would have delivered us to our door had we not gotten off a stop too soon in an overabundance of caution. Better than a taxi. Better than the Tube. Figured it out two days before we leave. Sigh.