Back in and around town there's Finch's Bay, a walking track to Cherry Tree Bay, the Botanic Gardens, Grassy Hill, the Cemetery and sunset over the water to occupy the photographer and the Historical Society Museum to occupy the ex-historian, so it's not as if we're going to run out of things to do.
From the Information Centre we were off to the Captain Cook Museum, located in the old convent with plenty of explanatory material, not just about Jimmy Cook but also covering, in impressive detail when you're looking at an overview, the broad sweep of the region's history.
How impressive? Well, how about the information that in the 1920s a Chinese family business farmed twenty thousand hectares out around Laura. Lying in the predawn dark the following morning I did a spot of calculation. Twenty thousand hectares at ten thousand metres a go equals two hundred million metres. That's two followed by eight zeroes. If five fours are twenty, you take the seven zeroes and split them four and three to give a notional strip of farmland five kilometres wide and forty kilometres long (or vice versa). The actual dimensions you’d be looking at wouldn't have made that kind of tidy rectangle, but it's a pretty impressive figure.
So, if you're looking for an excellent overview of the historical side of things, the James Cook Museum is definitely the way to go. I'm more interested in filling in the detail on my own version of the story, filling in the gaps in the memory, so Day Five has a visit to the other historical museum pencilled in to do that, because if there is a negative in the James Cook Museum (and I'll admit the possibility it's there but I managed to miss it) it's a lack of supporting material and references to add depth to the main narrative.
Summary: Strong on displays, short on supplementary material.
From the museum, however, with legs disinclined to further trekking, it was a choice between a light lunch and checking into the accommodation, and since it was just coming up to one o'clock, an hour ahead of standard check in time, lunch was the winner.