Coming Soon To A Bog Near You!

Ok, so I have already established the fact that I'm just a little nutty. I am a moose nut. I met and fell in love with Alces Alces when I was only four years old and the complications have been long lasting.

At the age of (was I really that young?) 57 I started dreaming of doing moose tours for a living and in 1999 (I think it was) I started building a website through Bigstep.com and came up with the name Mooseland Tours & Gift Shop (which I later shortened to Mooseland Tours & Gifts, it was easier to say on the phone!) and in April of 2001 we opened the doors to our new business at 448 Main Street, Norway, Maine.

The first shop was tiny (10' wide and 37' long, with a tiny cubicle in back for storage and a bathroom that was designed by a contortionist). We were mostly about the tours at this point and almost didn't take the lease on the store because it was way bigger than we had envisioned. Mostly we wanted a presence on Main Street, a base for our tour business. The gift shop was to have been online. We toyed with the idea of having just a few items showcased there to promote the online shop. While we were turning all this over and over in our minds trying to decide whether or not to take the lease there was another, far removed from our moose tours thing, going on in Norway. There had been weekly articles in the paper about a small group of kids that were considered as nuisances aka trouble makers. We sat in a local diner having breakfast and, tired of trying to make a decision about the lease, I picked up the weekly paper and started reading. The headlines said something about the "DownTown Gang" and as I read I became overwhelmed, not by the plight of the merchants, which I might soon be one of, but rather the small group of kids who obviously for some reason had nothing better to do than wander the streets and hang around in and out of the stores. Labels stick a long time, and kids with nothing to do will eventually find trouble. They were making the headlines weekly and somehow my imagination took me back to the dark ages when people were tarred and feathered and run out of town. These were just kids!

I threw down the paper and said to Leon, "I'm taking the store. I know what we're going to do with the extra space." My husband is a quiet, accepting man most of the time and as he finished his breakfast I laid out my plan that was still forming as I spoke the words.

We went back and signed the lease and thus began our saga...