COOMBS, B.C. -- I've seen a lot of gimmicks to get tourists to pull off the highway. Wall Drug has billboards all over the midwest. Lots of places have giant figures of something (often a local agricultural product, such as the giant artichoke we saw in Castroville, Calif., or the giant pineapple we climbed to the top of in Australia). Just up the road from Nanaimo today, a gas station had a giant gnome (which is an oxymoron, but then so are a lot of tourists).

But I've never seen goats on the roof. Or realized what an effective tourism gimmick they would be.

A young visitor shoots a photo of goats on the roof of the Old Country
Market in Coombs, B.C., along the highway to Port Alberni and Tofino.

The Old Country Market opened as a roadside produce stand in 1973, and somewhere along the line, they got the idea of growing grass on the roof (like the Ballard Library), and putting goats up there to keep it cropped. And we're not talking just an occasional shoving of a goat up there on mowing day; these grazers are up there all season long, once it gets warm enough. They have a little house and everything.

So everybody who's ever driven by the place has told their friends back home how there's this great place in a little backwater town on Vancouver Island that has goats on the roof. And word has spread, and now the place has turned into a major tourist trap, with a whole mini mall of souvenir shops selling kitschy Canadiana, and you can't get a parking spot.

The produce stand morphed into a homegrown Whole Foods, with a great bakery (we took home a loaf of rosemary five-cheese bread), upscale deli (with goat cheese, but not from the guys on the roof) and a nice little cafe. And outside, people sit at umbrella tables and shoot photos of the goats. Goats who are laughing all the way to the baaaa-nk.