MAY 3, 2014
OUTING AT CABELA’S, NEAR SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH. You’ve heard of Cabela’s, right? It’s a direct marketer and specialty retailer of hunting, fishing, camping, shooting and related outdoor recreation merchandise. I’ve been buying from their catalogs online for years, but today we visited an actual brick and mortar store. Have you ever been to one? It’s almost like spending a day at Disneyland!
ALMOST A TOURIST ATTRACTION. Cabela’s has a distinctive look to its retail operations, a look which turns its stores into tourist attractions. The store we visited today was like a cavernous showroom, bringing the outdoors inside. About 250,000 square feet of store! There were museum-quality displays of taxidermied wildlife, large aquariums, indoor mountains and archery ranges. Fishing skiffs, canoes, kayaks, waders, rods and reels, line, lures…you name it, Cabela’s fishing department has it all. In the camping area, there were displays of so many cool tents and so much neat outdoor camping gear it almost made us want to forgo our motor-home and sleep under the stars! There are literally hundreds of employees on the floor, each seemingly an expert about the offerings in his or her department and each having an uncanny ability to make you feel like a real outdoors-man…worthy of lots of high-end gear. I had picked out enough fishing gear to fill a drift boat to the gunwales when it dawned on me that it might be prudent to wait until I had found a stream or a lake and made a decision to actually go fishing before spending a month’s income here! What a fun afternoon!
There are all sizes and types of kayaks here…even in bold colors!
Florence posing with a mountain sheep…preserved of course!
