Oh, Connecticut: land of whales, women’s basketball, surprisingly good pizza, and, of course, Rory and Lorelai—the titular mother-daughter duo from the long-canceled (but recently rebooted) aughts WB series Gilmore Girls. I’ve seen the entire series all the way through roughly once a year since I discovered it in high school via the hilarious, often scathing recaps that writer Pamela Ribon did for Television Without Pity, which puts my total somewhere in the 15-plus range. Is it essentially white noise at this point? Yes, but I’m still capable of curling up and paying attention to its rehashed plot every fall—which is more than I can say for most of the comedy series I watch on a loop at bedtime.
The aforementioned string of vague cliches is all I’ve ever really gathered about Connecticut, despite spending my whole life visiting my dad’s parents in West Hartford, so when I got an email inviting me to experience something called the “Authentic Gilmore Girls Getaway Experience” at the Delamar Hotel in West Hartford, I leapt at the opportunity. No, I don’t normally relish the six-hour flight from LA to the East Coast, nor do I like fall anywhere near as much as Lorelai Gilmore famously loves winter, but I am used to making the pilgrimage to New York at least a few times a year to visit my own parents. So why not change the destination by a few hundred miles in order to visit a fictional representation of someone else’s TV family?
Upon arriving at the Delamar on a crisp November night and settling down to peruse the package’s options with a hot toddy, my natural urge to rank things kicked in. As such, here’s a rundown of the various Rory-and-Lorelai-themed offerings in order of how likely Rory and Lorelai would be to actually do them.
Item Number 1: Being picked up at the airport in a luxury convertible
Photo: Courtesy WB
Given that Rory Gilmore is quite possibly the most spoiled girl on Earth, I feel she’d enjoy this very much. Actually, it gets to a narrative pet peeve of mine: Rory is constantly painted as an angelic, helpful child “with a halo and a book” (to quote Lorelai), yet she’s used to having an entire town of zany side characters worship her and bring her food and build her cars. Don’t let the whole “raised by a teenage single mom” thing fool you, folks; Rory’s ancestors “came over on the Mayflower,” as she angrily reminds her boyfriend in a Season 5 episode, and I truly believe that at her core, she thinks she deserves to be catered to.
I, personally, do not feel that way about myself (or try not to, at least)—but if a suave and handsome hotel employee named Fernando is being dispatched to pick me up from the airport in a classic car reminiscent of the ones Lorelai’s buttoned-up businessman father Richard collects, who am I to quibble? There was a sign with my name on it! And free water in the car!
Item Number 2: Room-service coffee in bed from a Luke’s Diner mug
Photo: Courtesy WB
Everyone knows the Gilmore girls are major sloths with major caffeine addictions that would surely be catching up to them by now, were they in any way real—so it felt all too apropos to miss my private tour of the Mark Twain House (which Rory…mentions in an episode from Season 4, I think?) in favor of staying in bed, guzzling coffee, and watching TV. I tried to watch C-SPAN, in honor of Rory’s terrifying egghead frenemy Paris Geller, but I value my time and experience on this earth, so I switched to Seinfeld after about three minutes had passed.
Item Number 3: A massage at the Delamar Hotel spa
Photo: Courtesy WB
There does happen to be a semi-famous Season 2 episode of the show in which Lorelai and her patrician mother, Emily, go to a spa, but TBH, even if this item weren’t remotely tethered to Gilmore Girls lore, I would still have jumped on it. I walked out of my massage glowing, calm, and feeling as safe and taken care of as Rory during the cursed Season 5 arc when she lived in her grandparents’ pool house and Emily’s maid ran her baths and catered all her lavish breakfasts.
Item Number 4: Afternoon tea
Photo: Courtesy WB
I loved this (as would Emily Gilmore, I imagine), but Rory and Lorelai are strictly coffee-and-donut girls. They don’t know what they’re missing, though, because the hotel restaurant’s finger sandwiches were perfect and made me feel like a beautiful and omnipotent giant.
Item Number 5: Tour of the Yale University Art Gallery
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
Was this extremely cool? Yes. Did I get a private tour of a Mickalene Thomas show that I’ll be bragging about for the rest of my life? Also yes. Would Rory and Lorelai, devoted high-culture haters who prefer ordering pizza and mainlining Cop Rock to nosing around museums, ever be caught dead here? Absolutely not. Rory attended Yale, sure, but she’s a library girl through and through; and Lorelai might have gone there on a date with one of those generically handsome, one-episode wonders she went out with in the show’s earliest seasons, but that’s about it.
Item Number 6: A (bailed-on) Sookie St. James-style tasting menu at the hotel restaurant
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
I had every intention of sampling this feast (especially since I, like all normal people, have worshipped Melissa McCarthy ever since she first appeared as the amiable chef Sookie on Gilmore Girls), but a last-minute sore throat and headache forced me to cancel my reservation and spend the night watching a very meta Gilmore Girls marathon in my hotel room. Would Rory and Lorelai ever flake on Sookie like this? No, and they certainly wouldn’t watch a show about themselves, but A) Melissa McCarthy obviously wasn’t really there waiting for me (I checked), and B) how can anyone resist rewatching the episode where Rory’s sweet, aspiring-rocker bestie Lane gets drunk with her mean religious mom after a breakup? I can pretty much jump into the show from any episode of any season at this point and know exactly what’s going on, but IMO, the more Lane, the better.
All in all, did I need to experience the Gilmore Girls package in order to cement my decade-and-a-half-long fandom? Probably not, but it was definitely more fun than the Sex and the City bus tour I took around this time last year—and frankly, any endeavor that includes coffee and massages is one I’m delighted to experience. Now, if only there had been a “sit motionless in front of the TV while eating food dyed shades not found in nature” option on the itinerary, the spirit of Lorelai Gilmore (not to mention my own) might truly have been at rest.
