REGENT - These tourists, they look different than the guy in greasy jeans jumping out of his pickup to buy baler parts at the co-op store.

They wear knee-length shorts and sunglasses, and silver cameras bounce off their chests. Not only that, they get out of cars and rigs with license plates from far and wide.

The other strange thing is, there's more of them than regular "Regentites" wandering around Main Street on a sleepy summer day.

This might be normal for Regent, but it is not normal for most small southwestern North Dakota towns. These are not accidental tourists.

More than 20,000 of them come cruising up and down the Enchanted Highway every year. They come in all seasons, but mainly during that brief flash of loveliness called a North Dakota summer.

This year, besides six roadside metal sculptures, they're seeing something new.

Enchanted Highway creator Gary Greff, of Regent, reinvented an old invention and set it up a couple of weeks ago beside the Enchanted Highway gift shop in town.

Tourists can flip a switch and watch an old-fashioned mechanical whirligig.

When the switch is "on," two kids jump on a bed, mom dunks another pair in a bathtub, grandpa's rocker rocks and grandma rolls her rolling pin.

It's a hoot, all brightly painted and framed out in the metal outline of a two-story house.

A regular whirligig himself, Greff's switch is always "on."

The house, charming as it might be, is just the first of several whirligigs he plans to build.

"There's not enough there. It's interesting, but people look at it for a few minutes and then it's, 'Now what?'" he said.

He plans to add a guy moving back and forth with a lawnmower, a garden with a scarecrow and crows popping around, a fisherman perpetually casting and reeling, another 10 whirligigs at least.

The idea is to get tourists - who have already made Regent their destination - to linger awhile.

He envisions a motel, a restaurant and dinner theater.

He also hopes for more specialty shops, like the one next to the Enchanted Highway gift shop.

Metal Magic sells an array of gift and home decor items, all made of metal, of course.

The community is getting welded to the idea, investing money toward making the town's park more attractive. Cenex plans to reface the building with modern tin and canopies, eventually setting up an old automobile with a whirligig attendant moving to and fro.

Greff, lean and tanned, doesn't have much time to devote to whirligig chat, or even to all the goings-on in Regent.

It's a rush back out to the Enchanted Highway, where he's preparing the site for the seventh roadside sculpture, coming soon between the grasshoppers and the pheasants.

For this one - Fisherman's Dream - he's returning to the three-dimensional form that makes some of the sculptures such artistic standouts.

Under a gigantic wave of water 40 feet high, he'll affix metal replicas of North Dakota game fish. The granddaddy, though, will be a 70-foot bass arcing through the water.

When that's up come August, there are four more sculptures to go and the Enchanted Highway dream will be complete.

"There's a lot happening," Greff said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 1-888-303-5511, or lauren@westriv.com.)