How Toledo's Secor Comfort Inn Became My Second Home

[Excerpted from How I Became an Urban Camper, available for purchase at lulu.com]

I live in the Great Lakes region where camping is a way of life. Every weekend during the summer months, thousands travel from urban areas to the countryside to camp out in RV’s, mobile homes, cabins, weekend homes, or the dozens of resorts clustered around the lakes. Lake Erie is nearest Toledo and there is a thriving camping industry that centers around our local Great Lake and its tributaries.
I actually belong to a resort located on the Portage River that leads directly to Lake Erie. It’s only forty minutes from my house to a nice little cottage close to the water; however, when not working I was rehearsing with a music group I sang with for the first six and a half years I lived in the city, then attended the local university for two years to work on a post-graduate degree and after that, joined a theatre group that rehearsed on the weekends, and then became a weekend reporter for a local weekly newspaper and for six years worked seven days a week, unable to get away for the weekend very often.

So, I found another way to “get away” without leaving town. Instead of staying in a cottage or the resort’s hotel, I started to take short “staycations” in a local hotel. Initially, I chose one close to home, a Comfort Inn on Alexis Road in Toledo, Ohio. It’s close, convenient, reasonably priced, and offers a continental breakfast. It’s also located on a street that has a number of restaurants where I could have lunch and/or dinner.

I enjoyed getting away from home while remaining in town so I could rehearse on the weekends. Then, I moved to another hotel in the same chain on Secor Avenue that was within walking distance of a movie theater. There are also several restaurants nearby, including one at a hotel next door.

It was great! I could go to a movie, have dinner, and walk back to my hotel. Unfortunately, the theater closed; but by the time it closed, I was hooked on my new Comfort Inn that’s smaller and friendlier than the one close to home, and is also located in a more central location to get to other places I needed to go, including the library at the university where I was enrolled and where I needed to go on weekends to do research. Another phenomenal thing happened after the theater closed. Eventually, I cared less and less about leaving the hotel and it became first, a place of refuge, then a work place.

Once my hotel stays graduated from using a hotel room as a place to crash after going other places to my primary destination for either rest and reflection or work and inspiration, I found myself spending more and more time there.