These final days of the trip are becoming more difficult, there’s a definite sense of us marking time rather than progressing towards a goal. As we plan the final days and nights of our trip backwards from a week on Monday when we fly out, there’s a real feeling that we’re looking for something to do before then and coming up short on motivation and ideas.
We’d hoped that today would shake us out of that a bit as we headed to Trial Bay to stay at a camp site adjacent to the ruins of the Trial Bay Gaol.
It was only a short trip from Nambucca Heads to Trial Bay of around 70km so even the inevitable roadworks on the Pacific Highway couldn’t delay us for long so we arrived at 11am with plenty of time to look around the gaol ruins and the museum.

The gaol was interesting and in fairly good condition. It was created in the late 19th century as part of a public works programme to build a breakwater for Trial Bay using more hardened criminals. When progress on the breakwater was slower than anticipated and the gaol seemed to be an embarrassment to the prison reform process, the gaol was closed.
It was reopened for a short period during the First World War when it was used to house German nationals as potential spies. It was closed again in 1917 after an alleged sighting of a disguised German warship off the coast led to claims that they might be planning to rescue the prisoners. After the war all the prisoners, including naturalised Australians were repatriated to Germany.

From what I can gather, due to an oblique reference in the museum, Trial Bay itself gets it’s name from a ship called “Trial” that floundered in the bay in the mid 19th century.
Tomorrow we’re going to head to Port Macquarie, probably for a 2 night stay. Our main interest in this town is the Koala population that may give us our first sighting of Koalas in the “wild”. There’s also a few museums and a Koala hospital there that will keep us occupied and hopefully help shake off this feeling of marking time a bit.