I like balloons

While googling for information about the town of Canowindra, I came upon this rather impressive website, which makes manages to make a lot out of a very little town:

Exhibit A: the title

CANOWINDRA - THE BALLOONING CAPITAL OF AUSTRALIA

Meaning not that their population is ballooning. Nope. There’s just a lot of hot air balloons in their neck of the woods.

Exhibit B: the About page
... which somehow manages to begin the history of Canowindra ‘Thousands of years ago’. It’s because they found some old fish fossils there or something.

Thousands of years ago a large number of fish were stranded on dryland after the water level suddenly fell. The fish, many of them unique, were preserved for posterity in layers of rock only to be discovered in the 1900s and then
catapulted into fame when their true value was realised.

They then employ this seamless segue:

In between the land has seen many changes, particularly in the past 150 years with the development of a township not far from where the fishwere left high and dry.

Exhibit C: page devoted to balloons.

“The flight lasts an hour but the memories last a lifetime”

Exhibit D: page devoted to The Age of Fishes

“A chance discovery by a roadworker in 1956 has led, many years later, to one of the worlds great fossil discoveries in central west New South Wales, Australia.”

We’re not saying it’s the greatest, mind. Just that it’s great.

The combination of humility and bluster is, in fact, rather sweet. It reminds me of other great tourist drawcards in the Australian countryside – the Holbrook submarine, (now marooned in the middle of the driest continent on earth), or the awe-inspiring Albury-Wodonga sculpture, simply titled,

World’s largest air guitar.

We are not suggesting that the goodly township of Canowindra is as grouse as this grouse here. Actually, we pretty much are.