I can't lie to you: I love The Gilmore Girls. If you don't know what it is, it's a TV show about a sassy, fast talking mother and daughter, based in small town Connecticut. Yes that's right, I used the word sassy. I started watching it a few years ago while working with a psychopath who wanted to kill me. It's a nice show where nothing really happens and it brought me such comfort, that I bought and devoured all seven series one after the other. It also made Connecticut look like one of the most idyllic places on Earth. I can't lie to you: it's one of the reasons we're over here.
After a very hearty breakfast, we headed north, away from the interstates and cities and into the small town Connecticut of my TV dreams. It looked exactly as I'd hoped. The journey took in clapboard houses of reds, blues and greys, white churches, flags flying, trees, pickup trucks, tidy little towns. Washington Depot is a one such town and apparently the basis for the Gilmore Girls' home. We stayed long enough to take in just about everything - about an hour. We went into the town bookstore (called The Hickory Stick) to be greeted by the cashier shouting, 'Happy independent bookstore day!' The cynical side of me thought it was a ruse to make sales, but it seemed to be true. And it was perhaps the most beautiful bookshop I've ever been in. So we bought a couple of things. Best ruse I've ever been caught by.
When driving, I've almost lost my tendency to veer to the right. Today's learning curve happened in the middle of nowhere, when the wheels started rumbling through gravel and some roadside branches began tapping at the windows. I'd like to be able to say that E was really cool about it. But she wasn't. And rightly. I've been much better since.
We made our way to somewhere called The Dinosaur Place. It's a beautifully apt name for a place that boasts 40 life size sculptures of dinosaurs over 60 acres and it is brilliant. I was genuinely moved to see an 80 foot tall plaster dinosaur. I felt like Sam Neil in Jurassic Park when he first sees the big ones and John Williams' score comes sweeping in. I heard it in my head. S loved it and ran wild, meeting every new dinosaur she saw with enthusiasm as if she had just discovered it. She exhausted herself in the playground there and in the maze (that we absolutely nailed) and at dinner, put her head down on the table and tried to go to sleep. E made the linguistic slip of asking for the bill rather than the check, but thankfully they knew what we meant.
Tonight's residence is a proper motel in a place called Old Saybrook, a town where the Internet tells me Katherine Hepburn used to hang out. The desk clerk was one of those people who starts nice, but becomes weird and the more he talks, the less you wished you'd heard him say. But it all adds to the authenticity of the place. We're on the upper deck, overlooking the car park. We've locked the door and put the chain on.
The dressing on my thumb has become a bit weathered through the day. It acquired a couple of stains at breakfast, one from the bacon I had with my cream cheese smothered bagel, one from the jam I had on the hot waffle I'd just made. The donuts didn't cause any stains. The thing with the jam stain is that it's right on the part of my thumb that was bleeding and every time I look at it, I have to remind myself it's jam, because I'm terrified I'll start bleeding again and I drive myself mad with imagining. And I know it's definitely jam because I've tasted it. Several times. Anyway, if I keep eating breakfasts like that, I'll soon swell into a featureless mass of fat, my fingers will unite into blubbery flippers and it won't matter that I once sliced off half my thumb.
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