I know it’s been a minute since I’ve written a “Throttle Therapy” column, but there’s a pretty good reason for that: It’s hot. I mean, like really, properly hot.
And while I love riding on our motorcycle, Dora, I have absolutely no desire to spend several hours sitting on top of a hot engine while wearing boots and a helmet, with the sun doing its best to turn me into a roast dinner.
So, for the past few months, Dora has been sitting there.
She hasn’t complained. She hasn’t guilt-tripped Omar and me. She hasn’t even looked particularly disappointed that the long rides that used to be such a big part of our life in Mexico have disappeared from the calendar.
She’s just been waiting.
And I’ve been making excuses.
Some of them are legitimate, like the brutal heat. But I’ve also realized I had quietly fallen into the habit of thinking that if we couldn’t go for a proper ride, there wasn’t much point in going at all.
A few hours? Not really worth getting the gear on. A couple of hours? We wouldn’t get anywhere. Just a quick ride? Well, we might as well wait until the weather cools down.
And so, we waited.
I’ve missed it, though. I’ve missed those rides where we leave home without much of a plan and somehow end up six hours later in a place neither of us intended to visit.
Confusing therapy with mileage
The rides where we stop for coffee, then tacos, then happen on something interesting down a road we’ve never taken before. The ones where we pull over simply because the view is too good to keep moving.
Somewhere along the way, I think I started confusing the therapy with the mileage. If we couldn’t give Dora a full day, it somehow didn’t count. Then, recently, I realized that was a bit ridiculous.
I needed a ride.
Not an epic adventure or a new destination. Not a six-hour exploration of roads neither of us had ever traveled. I just needed to get on the bloody motorcycle.
So yesterday, Omar and I took Dora out for a short ride along one of our favorite stretches of Highway 200 between Mismaloya and Boca de Tomatlán.
If you’ve never ridden that road, it’s one of those places that makes you understand why people fall in love with this part of Mexico. And yes, I know that sounds like the beginning of a tourism advertisement, but I’m afraid it’s true.
Bougainvillea spills over walls. Palm trees pop up between buildings. There are little tiendas, concrete houses painted in colors that somehow seem brighter in the Mexican sunshine, battered signs and the occasional roadside shrine decorated with flowers.
There’s activity everywhere: A man sitting in the shade, someone washing something outside their house, kids running around, dogs that seem to believe they own whichever patch of road they happen to be standing on.
And then, as if by some glorious magic, the jungle opens up and there it is: the Pacific. Blue all the way to the horizon, crashing against the rocks below.
A quick stop along the Pacific
I’ve ridden that road countless times, and it still gets me.
We rode for a while, then pulled Dora over and walked down to the beach. There was music coming from somewhere. Families were sitting under umbrellas. Young couples were running in and out of the water. Boats bobbed offshore. And, because this is Mexico, there was a man selling shrimp on a stick.
Obviously, we bought some. I’m not sure whether food tastes better when it’s slathered in salt and hot sauce, and you’re eating it on a Mexican beach, but I’m willing to conduct further research.
We sat there for a while, talked a little, watched the water and did absolutely nothing.
And it was exactly what I needed.
The whole thing probably took less than two hours. A few months ago, I might have looked at that and thought it didn’t really count. We hadn’t gone far enough. We hadn’t discovered somewhere new. We hadn’t found some tiny mountain village neither of us had heard of. We hadn’t clocked enough miles to justify getting Dora out of the garage.
But sitting there with grilled shrimp and lime, my feet in the sand and the Pacific in front of me, I realized I’d been looking at it all wrong.
It was never really about the distance. It was about getting out of my own head.
That’s what riding has always done for me.
When you’re on a motorcycle, there isn’t much room for thinking about the emails you haven’t answered, the article you need to finish, the laundry sitting in the basket, or whatever else has been rattling around in your head.
Living outside the waiting room
You have to pay attention.
To the road. The traffic. The bend ahead. The truck coming the other way. The smell of the trees. The heat. The sudden glimpse of the ocean.
And for a while, that’s all there is.
I think we spend far too much time waiting for the right conditions to do things. We’ll go when work settles down. When the weather is better. When we have a whole weekend. When we have enough time to do it properly.
I’m starting to wonder how much of life gets missed while we’re waiting for “properly.”
That little ride reminded me that sometimes two hours can be enough. You don’t always need to go somewhere. Sometimes you just need to go.
And maybe that’s what I’ve missed most about Dora.
Not the long rides themselves, although I certainly miss those. It’s the way a motorcycle can make an ordinary day feel like you’ve gone somewhere. You can leave home with no particular plan, follow Highway 200 for a while, stop on a beach, eat shrimp from a stick and sit looking at the Pacific. Then you get back on, and you go back home.
Nothing monumental happened. And somehow, everything feels a little better.
That’s one of the things I love about living in Mexico. It isn’t always the big, postcard moments. It’s the fact that they can turn up in the middle of an otherwise completely ordinary day.
I know we’ll get back to the long rides, and we already have plans for Dora when the weather finally decides to stop trying to melt us. There are roads we haven’t traveled, places we still want to see and, knowing us, probably a few wrong turns waiting to happen.
But I’m not going to wait for the perfect day or the perfect amount of time anymore.
Because it turns out “Throttle Therapy” doesn’t require a full tank, six hours and a destination.
Sometimes it just requires getting on the bike. And sometimes, if you’re extra lucky, it even comes with a side of shrimp.
Charlotte Smith is a writer and journalist based in Mexico. Her work focuses on travel, politics, and community. You can follow along with her travel stories at www.salsaandserendipity.com.
