Every long trip has one thing it is actually built around, even if the rest of the itinerary politely pretends otherwise. Four weeks across England, Ireland and Scotland, twelve days of Highland motorhoming, castles and steam trains and cold water. All of it existed because of one afternoon in an arena in the east end of Glasgow.
Our home for the final stretch was Lomond Woods Holiday Park at Balloch, at the southern tip of Loch Lomond, chosen for one very practical reason. Balloch is the end of the rail line. With three days of city travel ahead of us, Glasgow one day and Edinburgh the next, having a station at the end of the road rather than a drive and a park and a fare was worth a lot. On that measure it delivered completely. The amenities were good, and the games room for the kids was the first we had come across in five campgrounds, which after nearly two weeks of Highland weather was welcome.
I will be honest about the rest of it though. Something about the place did not sit right with us. It sits in the middle of a residential neighbourhood, and it never felt like somewhere people had travelled to in order to get away from things. There were no kids running loose between pitches. Nobody was outside cooking in the evening. None of the low hum that a good campsite has after about six o'clock, where you can hear four different families having four different nights. The weather was grey and that surely played a part. Even so, it had the feeling of checking into a hotel in your own town.
I am not suggesting everyone staying there was local. It just did not have the holiday air the other four had. Of the five campgrounds on our Highlands loop, Witches Craig at Stirling, Auchnahillin at Inverness, Portree on Skye, Glen Nevis at Fort William and this one, Lomond Woods was our least favourite. Best located, least loved.
We took the train in, and stepping onto the platform at Dalmarnock produced a genuinely lovely moment of recognition. This was exactly where the whole Scottish leg had started. Dalmarnock is where we had collected Hamish thirteen days earlier before driving north to Stirling. We had gone up through Stirling, Inverness, Skye, Fort William, Glen Coe and back down to Loch Lomond, and here we were standing on the same platform, about to do the thing all of it had been arranged around. From the station it is a short walk to the Emirates Arena, which sits directly across the road from Celtic Park.
Four years ago, at the end of the previous Commonwealth Games, Katherine announced that we should go to the next one. She was eight. She is also an artist rather than an athlete, so this was not the request I would have predicted. But the next Games were headed for Melbourne, which from Wollongong is entirely achievable, so I said yes without much thought about it.
Then in 2023 Victoria pulled out, and for a while the whole thing looked like it might not happen at all. Glasgow stepped in and took it on, confirmed by the Commonwealth Games Federation in October 2024, twelve years after the city had already hosted in 2014. A stripped back programme of ten sports across four venues within an eight mile corridor, running 23 July to 2 August 2026.
When the announcement came through I made a joke about how we would just have to go to Scotland instead. Katherine, ten by then, lit up. You cannot say no to that. So we did not, and about eighteen months of planning later, here we were.
Glasgow did a fine job of it. The whole thing felt well run, there was plenty laid on for kids around the venue, and our session carried five gold medal events. Food inside was priced the way food inside sporting venues always is, and we knew that going in. Two Australian golds went through, which is exactly the right number to make a family from Wollongong feel like the trip was value for money. Katherine, meanwhile, attached herself immediately and permanently to Felix Dolci, the young Canadian who took two golds on our day and finished the Games with three individual titles plus a bronze.
The one I will remember was the women's floor exercise. England had two strong gymnasts in the final and looked to have gold and silver comfortably sewn up between them. Then the last competitor of the day, the unfancied Welsh girl, walked out.
Ruby Evans put down a spectacular routine. When the score came up at 13.500, ahead of Abi Martin on 13.333 and Shantae-Eve Amankwaah on 13.300, the look on her face said she had not seen it coming any more than the rest of us had. The arena came up off its seats.
That is the entire argument for going to live sport rather than watching it. You cannot plan for that. You just have to be in the room.
The other constant all afternoon was the noise whenever a Scottish athlete did anything at all. A home crowd at a home Games is a genuinely different animal, and Glasgow brought it every single time.
One observation rather than a complaint, though it is worth knowing if you are planning around a major event. ScotRail seemed to me to have underplanned the day. We had a service cancelled outright, and heard announcements of others going the same way. I had seen signage advertising additional services laid on for the Games, but that did not translate into anything we could see on the ground. My suspicion is that trains were moved around like pieces on a board, more here and fewer there, and we happened to be standing on the wrong square.
The waiting itself was no hardship. What it did mean was standing room only for a long run of stops back out to Balloch, at the end of a full day on our feet with two tired kids. If you are doing something similar, build in the assumption that the return leg will be slower and less comfortable than the timetable suggests, and do not book anything tight for that evening.
One day out of twenty eight. One session, five finals, a couple of hours in a seat. It was the reason for all of it. We came to Scotland because a ten year old lit up at an idea her dad floated as a joke, and everything else we saw over four weeks, the Storr and the Fairy Pools and the steam train and the wee white house, exists because of that.
Best joke I ever made.
