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?

We had one more day in Bisbee and decided to spend it going for a ride and hike. We heard about the Chiricahua National Monument, “A wonderland of Rocks.” According to the National Parks Service website. After a night at the Grand Saloon going for a hike seemed like a good idea. We started the day having coffee with Destiny, a motorcycle friend, who recently moved to Bisbee from the Seattle area. It was fun to take time to hang out and hear her take on living in Bisbee. Continue reading →

Ahhh Bisbee. I hardly know where to start or what to say about the place but I’ll give it a try. It is a truly unique place on this earth and I’m glad we got to spend a few days exploring and getting to know it. But first… let’s catch up on the trip there.

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Ok, that’s it. We’re spending the winter in Mexico! On motorcycles, of course. We decided to make this a slightly different type of motorcycle trip. Instead of blasting through the country we are going to slow down and explore things at a slower pace, get to know the places we visit and work more on my Spanish speaking skills. We’ll see how that goes.. Continue reading →