More than one knowledgeable person has told me not to ride a motorcycle into Mexico City. I suppose that would be the main reason that we’ve never visited the capital of Mexico and home to almost 9 million people. The metropolitan area has over twice as many people at about 22 million people. Of course, to get to the city you need to ride through the metropolitan area. In short, it’s crowded.

Not a bad way to spend the winter upon retrospect. I suppose we were both getting a little restless with our long stays and decided to get some more riding in. It seems like some of the best motorcycle roads in Mexico travel between the mountains and the ocean. So, our destination after the mountain town of Taxco was Zihuatanejo, still in the state of Guerrero.

Google maps initally suggested a longer but faster route but I changed it to ride down a remote two lane road MEX51 and then MEX134 to the ocean. The time? Almost nine hours?? No way… maybe.

The destination for the day was the town of Patzquaro, Michoacan. Not far from Santa Clara de Cobre but we, of course took the long way around. Literally, we wanted to make the trip around Lake Patzquaro to see the famous artisans around the lake. We stopped at a few places but mostly just enjoyed the nice two lane route with scenic views as we made our way to Patzquaro. We arrived early enough to explore the town a little but were getting restless and spent some more time planning our next adventure.

Time to leave PV, the sun, the beach and all the tourists. We were on a mission to visit the very non-touristy Puebla of Santa Clara de Cobre in Michoacan, Mexico. We loaded up our neglected motorcycles that had been sitting for 10 days and were almost ready to leave when during my routine tire pressure check Deby’s relatively new rear tire measured exactly Zero PSI. The stiff sidewalls of the MotoZ GPS tire held up the bike so I thought my gauge was faulty. I checked her front tire and it was fine…. hmmm. Yup there was no air in the back tire. How did that happen???

A careful inspection found this…

It was a different couple of weeks being mostly off the bikes and having a “vacation from our vacation.” I’ll give you a brief summary but for my snowbound northern friends I’ll leave off most, but not all, of the beach and sunset photos.

This will be a little different post. I keep reminding myself the is a motorcycle blog, far too many other bloggers write travel blogs and they are much better than this. But this time I wanted to include something about Zacatacas. Yes, we did ride our motorcycles there, it took us about 4 hours to ride the 180 miles from Durango to Zacatacas. We were on mostly two lane highway through farmland as we gradually gained elevation until we were over 7,000 feet at our destination.

The Devil’s Backbone. Click on the link to read about it on DangerousRoads.org. Why is it that we keep seeking out “dangerous roads?” I’ve lost track of how many of the routes touted on that website we’ve ridden. Well, here goes another one. Actually, Deby and I have ridden this road before…. three times! And we keep coming back. Our compadre, Richard said he had never heard of it and wasn’t sure where we were taking him. The night before we were to ride it he found the Dangerous Roads website. At breakfast he expressed concern about our plan.

The road from Yecora to Creel is a top notch motorcycle road. It is full of endless curves at high elevations with bountiful scenic views.

My new motorcycle was loving the road almost as much as I was. The morning air was cool as we rode at elevations from 5,000 feet at our starting point of Yecora to nearly 9,000 feet before dropping down to 7,700 feet in Creel.

After four nights in Alamos we felt we had a good feel for the town. We found our favorite restaurants and went for long walks exploring every day. One day we walked up a steep set of stairs to a mirador and got a few pictures of this quaint city in the mountains.

It’s 142 miles from Silver City to the Mexico border, or about two and a half hours riding. We left in the cold, about 48 degrees F with all of our warmest riding gear on. I felt like a wimp on my cushy new BMW when I flipped on the heated seat… geesh. Soft or what?