Loxton

Hugh and his sister and I went on a road trip last week. We drove three hours east to a town called Loxton. Hugh's sister will be doing a sort of apprenticeship there, so she needed to check it out and meet some peeps. It is a decently-sized town along the Murray River, right near the state border with both Victoria (capital: Melbourne) and New South Wales (capital: Sydney). While she met her peeps, Hugh and I needed to kill some time, so I made him take me to "Historic Loxton."

I figured this would simply be the older part of town. It was more like a theme park, like the early days of Knotts Berry Farm. Basically, someone collected a bunch of old buildings, a couple of which were once in Loxton but most of which were from neighboring small towns. They put these together with a bunch of 1970's recreations of old Loxton buildings, added narrations by baby-boomers (activated by motion-sensor!), threw in several pieces of farm equipment from days gone by, and plopped a 9-month-old kangaroo named Gemma down in the center.

Gemma followed humans around devotedly, but didn't actually care about them at all. She would permit you to pet her but would not pay attention to you if you were dressed in a kangaroo-food costume. She was like the ultimate cat.

Needless to say, I loved it. It was kind of like the ghost towns we used to visit on camping trips. Hugh got into a bit of trouble, but I managed to get him out.

Of course, we took obligatory photos of trains for Pops.

And I found this particularly amusing. Ah, electricity!