Motorcycle travel has been woefully absent from my life lately. It’s left a huge hole in my life. Here’s where I confess it’s been over a year and a half since my last motorcycle trip. Ouch.
In the course of my annual birthday reflection, I had to acknowledge that my life is way off-kilter. So I made myself a few promises. One of them was to reclaim my soul and get back to motorcycle travel. And what better time than for my birthday?
Unfortunately, in an off-kilter life, it’s not as simple as just packing up and going on a trip, responsibilities be damned. But my dear man and I figured out a way to combine business with pleasure. We charted a route that would allow us to get in some nice twisties and still accomplish what we were originally planning to do by car. It was a win-win.
Birthday pizza
Our first planned stop was in the Village of Magdelena, New Mexico. We did a deep dive on understanding the lodging and dining options there before we left but there were definitely some question marks. It’s a really small town with limited services so we were prepared to make the extra 27-mile stretch to Socorro if we couldn’t make it work.
We found a motel room that seemed to fit our needs and was walking distance to a saloon that served pizza. There was another restaurant with more offerings at the far end of town but would have required scrambling much further along a busy state highway with no sidewalks in the freezing dark. Call me crazy but that just didn’t sound like fun. So my birthday dinner was frozen saloon pizza. It wasn’t delivery, it was Digiorno. Literally.
You might be thinking, “Wow, Val, you really know how to go gourmet for your birthday.” Fortunately I didn’t have any expectations of a grand birthday dinner. And it still beat the time we overnighted in Twentynine Palms on our way to Baja with only a motel vending machine to raid for dinner. It’s all about perspective, right?
We ended up having a great time at the saloon with lots of friendly, welcoming locals. Plus a bonus surprise of live music by a great musician. So I call it a win.
And then things go bad
Magdalena rests at about 6,660 feet elevation and the overnight temperature was forecast to be 25 degrees. The motel room had a small mini-split unit that we cranked up once we arrived. During the night, though, we both woke up realizing it was fuck-all cold in the room.
The heater was not doing its job. We fiddled with the unit, each of us trying different things as our frustration built. Eventually I thought to look up the manual for the unit online to see what we needed to to do get it running again. I’ll let you fill in the blank on the string of profanity I uttered when I discovered that the unit doesn’t heat when the outside temperature is below 41 degrees. Which is, of course, when you actually need–you know–heat.
We tried to layer up and regain warmth in the room but by around 7 am we decided to set off for an early breakfast with the hope of warming up someplace else.
Hunting for breakfast
We had some concerns about the availability of breakfast given our pre-trip research and what we noticed coming into town. Sure enough, the small café in town wasn’t open. So we walked down to the fuel station to see if we could grab some coffee and frozen breakfast burritos—another less-than-optimal food management scenario we’ve had to employ in the past.
We were pleasantly surprised to score some locally made burritos that hit the spot. They were certainly a far cry better than the mass-produced frozen variety.
The fuel station had a small table and a couple of chairs tucked in a corner inside that I was eyeing intently for us to hover at for a bit to eat and thaw out. No luck. A couple of locals were hanging out chatting and there wasn’t room for us to join in. It was clear they planned to be there awhile so we begrudgingly shuffled our popsicle-like bodies back to our motel room.
Do we stay or do we go?
With some food and coffee in us, we had a little more bandwidth to consider our options. This was technically a work trip and we’d planned to spend the first part of the day scouting the art businesses in Magdalena. There aren’t many there but our new project is all about connecting rural artists so we wanted to meet some folks.
Under the circumstances, we opted to bail on that notion for this trip and try again another time. We were in no mood for it by then and needed to manage the more pressing situation of freezing our asses off.
That left us facing our next decision: do we stay in the freezing room until things warm up outside or head out on the bikes in below-freezing temperatures. Sure, we have some heated gear but even that has its limitations, especially when we’d be starting out already hypothermic.
We opted to layer up as much as possible and get some work done in the motel room while we waited for temperatures outside to get more agreeable. And then around 9:30 as we were nearly done loading up the bikes, the heater in the room decided to get to work. What a kick in the ass. It was almost insulting.
Equipment failure
My dear man’s bike doesn’t really like to start when temperatures dip low. He’s well aware of that and had gone outside earlier to make sure it would start. And it started like a champ so he let it warm up a bit before shutting it off. At least that’s one victory in this shit show. Or so we thought.
By the time we were fully loaded and ready to saddle up, his bike decided it wasn’t going to cooperate. Sigh. I pulled out my battery-powered jumper kit only to discover that we had the wrong set of alligator clips with us. The clamps we had on hand didn’t have the proper connector to the battery pack. We have multiple kits from the same brand but with differing connecters and somewhere along the way we mixed up the pieces of the kits.
Now what? We looked at the gravel parking lot ahead of us. There was just enough distance to bump start the bike. Maybe. It would be tight. In my head I was sizing up the scenario. We’re cold, tired, and frustrated. The parking lot is a gravel surface with not a ton of room to accomplish our goal if we don’t get it right on the first try. No way this can go wrong. But we were out of options.
My dear man reassembled his bike seat from the failed jump starting machinations and mounted up to attempt the bump start. Then he gave it one last try. The bike started. We both took a deep breath. He said “How about we get the hell out of here?” I agreed, wholeheartedly.
Truth or Consequences
I’m happy to report our fortune improved from that point. We made a brief stop in Socorro to visit a gallery there, grabbed lunch, and boogied to Truth or Consequences which was our main destination for the trip. The stretch between Socorro and T or C is largely interstate but we were able to mainly stay on side and frontage roads and not have to participate in that scene. Freeway riding is unequivocally horrible and we avoid it as much as possible.
We arrived in T or C just as the daylight was getting low and temperatures were beginning to drop. We shacked up at a funky historic hot springs motel downtown to be walking distance to the art galleries we wanted to visit. When we saw that the rooms were equipped with the same kind of lame mini-split unit from the motel the night before I thought, “Are you fucking kidding me?!?”
It was a false alarm, though. The overnight lows weren’t nearly as onerous in T or C now that we were at much lower elevation. Plus our room was also equipped with a space heater. What a concept, right?
In spite of a toilet that sounded like a second-grade recorder recital, I reveled in the otherwise agreeable, spacious room. I spread out my yoga towel and tended to my stiff muscles from two cold days on the bike with a short but vigorous Vinyasa flow.
With some physical relief, I was ready to explore T or C. We ate our way around town for the next day and a half in between art gallery visits. It finally felt like a proper birthday trip.
Keeping the rubber side down
Our whirlwind tour required one last day of riding to get home. We opted for the scenic route over Emory Pass in the Black Range. It’s a spectacular ride with fantastic twisties—the kind that remind you why you ride. It’s actually our favorite day ride from home and we ride it quite a bit.
So we know the road well. Well enough to know we would be riding it gingerly that day. There is a longish stretch of those gorgeous twisties that spend most of the time in the shade. Sure enough, there was ice coating the asphalt in those shady spots, even though it was well into the afternoon.
It was also a very high-contrast day in terms of lighting. Our eyes were having to adjust to the quickly alternating bright sun and deep shade which adds to the challenge of managing the potentially slick surface. As you can imagine, it was not a spirited ride through that section, but beautiful nonetheless.
We made it home safe and sound then celebrated having broken our moto travel dry spell. I don’t know what the next trip will be yet but I can tell you it damn well won’t be another year-and-a-half before it happens.
Trip assessment
You might not know that I have an inner Type A personality that I work pretty hard to keep in check. She can be a real bitch. But I do try to use her for good on occasion. Just like my annual life assessments when I reflect on the things I’ve done well and the areas I need to improve, I do post-trip assessments as well. That’s when I can let Type-A Val do good work instead of evil.
Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised how much moto travel muscle memory I still had. It came back really quickly in terms of being in the mindset of not only managing the challenges of motorcycle travel but also enjoying the pure bliss of it. Motorcycle travel is a unique experience.
In the case of this trip, the only true surprise was the lack of heat in the motel room on the first night. That’s not something we could have anticipated. There was nothing in the reviews we found in our pre-trip research that gave us a head’s up on that one.
As for the breakfast issue, we knew that could be problematic going in so we had a backup plan. We always carry a handful of Kind bars (affiliate link) for emergencies. Had we not been able to score the burritos, we would have just noshed on a couple of those to hold us off until we got to the next town. Not ideal, but we would have been ok.
I do need to refine my packing skills. I could have gotten away without the messenger bag that I strap to the passenger seat if I’d been more resourceful with the space in my panniers. In the past I’ve usually only had to make use of it when camping off the bike and needed the extra space to accommodate camping gear. It was unnecessary for this trip and just a hassle instead of a benefit. It would have been far better to rework my panniers and eliminate it from the equation. In the big scheme of things, that was very much a minor point.
The big take-away
The biggest reminder I’m taking away from this trip is the value of adventure travel. It forces us out of our comfort zones, makes us think ahead to manage avoidable issues, and requires us to flex our problem-solving muscles on the fly. All of those skills are good for our mental health and keeping the gray matter sharp.
And then there’s simply feeling like yourself again. That’s priceless.
Adventure on, friends!
PS — By the way, I sorted the mixed up jumper cable issue as soon as we got home. That lesson was well-learned. We’re not going to make that mistake again.
