EAST HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) – Leslie Coppola and Mark Guimond detoured several years ago while heading home from a vacation in Virginia, visiting a Cabela’s outdoors store in eastern Pennsylvania, where they camped out in their Winnebago at night and shopped during the day.

Coppola and Guimond can now take holidays a little closer to their New Britain home. Cabela’s is set to open today in East Hartford and, like its other 21 stores, is touting it as a tourist destination.

“We took a couple of vacation days to be here,” Coppola said Thursday outside the store after she won permission to bring their RV on Friday. “It’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible.”

Cabela’s, which has stores primarily in the South, West and Midwest, was putting the finishing touches on its first New England store Thursday afternoon, hours before opening to the public.

Clerks arranged sweaters on display, workers inspected an aquarium and other employees stocked shelves.

The 185,000 square feet of retail space is not a typical store. Though Cabela’s sells clothing, guns, food, camping and fishing gear, automotive equipment, hunting equipment, pet supplies and more, it promotes its business as a sort of natural history museum.

Cabela’s picked the East Hartford site because it already has many catalog customers in the area – it mails 120 million catalogs a year – and is close to southern New England’s coastal fishing areas, Boldrick said.

The destination-retail business is catching on, said Derek W. Leckow, an analyst at Barrington Research in Chicago.

Revenue at Cabela’s has risen by more than 78 percent, from $1.2 billion in 2002 to $2.18 billion on June 30, according to Capitaliq.com.

Based in Sidney, Neb., Cabela’s is tentatively planning a second New England store next year in Scarborough, Maine.

Scarborough is 25 miles from Freeport, the home of L.L. Bean.