By day fourteen of a four week trip we had earned a day with no agenda. So we gave ourselves one. No summits, no castles, no drone, no schedule. Just a city, and whatever it wanted to give us.
Full disclosure. We had spent the previous evening seriously discussing whether to pack up Lomond Woods and find something between Glasgow and Edinburgh, because the site had never quite clicked for us and because a base further east would have made both this day and the following one easier. We decided against it, and I am glad we did. Moving a motorhome for the sake of thirty minutes each way is the kind of optimisation that costs you an evening and gains you very little. Instead we walked down to Balloch station again, tried a different cafe on the way, and got on with it.
There is something worth saying here too. After twelve days of driving Scotland, single track roads and passing places and gorge edges and Glen Coe, a few days of pure train travel was a genuine pleasure. Somebody else drives, you look out the window, nobody navigates. Balloch being the terminus of the line meant we could walk to the platform from the pitch.
The one wrinkle is the change at Glasgow Queen Street, where trains from Balloch come into the low level station and trains to Edinburgh leave from the high level. It is a short walk and a set of stairs and escalators, and today, with a day bag each, it was fine. Tomorrow, with four weeks of luggage, I could already tell it was going to be a different experience.
An hour and three quarters after Balloch, we were in Edinburgh.
We had spent so much of this trip in glens, on ridges and beside lochs that a city felt genuinely novel, and we decided we would simply be in it rather than tick it off. So we wandered. The Royal Mile, obviously, with all its noise. Victoria Street, which curves and climbs and is painted in colours no other street in Britain would attempt. Small shops. Cafes. The kind of day where you go where the next interesting doorway is. Lunch was at The Little Larder. I had eaten at the other Larder nine years ago on a previous trip, and I am pleased to report the standard has held.
We took a guided Harry Potter walking tour, and it was well worth doing with a twelve year old and a six year old in tow. It runs through Greyfriars Kirkyard, up and around Victoria Street, and into a series of closes and corners around the Old Town, each with some claimed connection to the films, the books, or to J.K. Rowling's time writing in the city. A good guide makes this sort of thing, and ours knew how to hold two very different age groups at once.
Victoria Street is very widely described as the inspiration for Diagon Alley, and it is easy to see why, but Rowling has never confirmed it. Greyfriars contains a headstone for a Thomas Riddell, which is a genuine coincidence and a genuinely eerie thing to stand in front of, but that is different from established provenance. None of which makes the tour less enjoyable. It just means the fun is in the atmosphere and the storytelling rather than in verified history, and it is better to walk in knowing that.
We chose not to do Edinburgh Castle. That now means two trips to this city for me without ever going inside it. Last time I climbed the Scott Monument instead, which I would recommend to anyone with functioning knees and no fear of narrow spiral stairs. But two for two is starting to look less like a choice and more like a pattern, so it goes at the top of the list for next time.
Then the weather arrived properly, and instead of fighting it we let it decide the rest of the day. We found a couple of bookshops, one of which had been trading for well over a century. And then we found Topping and Company, which is the shop Katherine has essentially been describing to me since she learned what a bookshop could be.
It occupies a Grade A listed former bank on Blenheim Place, designed by William Playfair, and runs across three floors holding more than 70,000 books. There are rolling ladders on the shelves. There are chairs scattered about so you can actually sit and read. And they will bring you tea or coffee, for free, while you browse.
We were in there a long time. Partly waiting out the rain, mostly because both girls were completely gone into it, and there is no reason on earth to interrupt that. If you have a reader in the family, put this on your Edinburgh list ahead of most of the attractions.
The trip home did not go smoothly. Another cancelled service meant waiting for a later and considerably fuller train. That train then broke down somewhere between Glasgow and Balloch, depositing everyone onto a platform with no shelter, in rain, with the next service 45 minutes away and two tired children.
So we booked an Uber, and here is the useful part. It worked. That was not a given. Earlier in the trip, at Glen Nevis, I pre booked an Uber the night before to get us to Fort William station for the Jacobite. The app accepted the booking and gave every indication a car was coming. In the morning it simply sat there telling me it was finding a driver, because there is no Uber operating in Fort William. A local taxi rescued us with not much time to spare.
The lesson, if you are planning a Scottish road trip. Do not assume rideshare exists outside the cities. Get a local taxi number and put it in your phone before you need it.
Back at Loch Lomond it worked exactly as advertised. A driver turned up, ran us the 35 minutes home through the rain, and somehow we came out the other side without any Commonwealth Games surge pricing.
Dinner was deliberately unambitious. The Queen of the Loch, a local pub restaurant, because it was our final night in Hamish and we were completely spent. It landed somewhere between a family chain restaurant and a proper pub, but it was Scottish, it was warm, and nobody had to cook. Job done.
Then packing. Four weeks of accumulated stuff, twelve days of motorhome living, all of it to be compressed into cases so we can hand the van back cleanly in the morning at the same place we picked it up. Dalmarnock.
