San Miguel de Allende Motorcycle Ride

January 15, 2012Ricardo Perez

San Miguel de Allende

Our trip in 2006 to San Miguel de Allende was one of the best riding trips we ever took into Mexico.

We met in Pharr, Texas on Hwy 281 just north of the international bridge from Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. It was almost exactly a year since our last trip into Mexico when we rode down to Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosi, Mexico on a short four day ride. Real de Catorce was at one point in time the richest silver mining town in the western hemisphere and now is a quaint tourist village whose only entrance is a one lane mile long tunnel.

Word spread about the good time we had the year before and our original group of 15 was now 28 with 18 bikes (with an additional couple joining us in Cd. Valles). It was the second week in March, coinciding with Texas schools’ spring break.

Lou, Bruce, Bob

My wife and I awoke about 3am to finish packing and to make sure we were in Pharr, about 20 miles from our house in Mission, on time. I had plenty of time to pack the bike, check everything, and recheck. We made Pharr right at 6am. There were already about six riders there, mostly the group that came down from Corpus Christi, but within twenty minutes everyone showed up. Seems we weren’t the only ones who couldn’t sleep!

Lunch Time

After we all topped-off our tanks, said a group prayer, and had our last cup of coffee we headed out at about 6:45am, still dark, across the international bridge into Mexico. The weather was a very nice 72 degrees or so. We rode through Reynosa’s eastside and out of town headed towards the coast then south on toward San Fernando and then Cd. Victoria. Eighteen motorcycles meandering through small Mexican villages and twisty mountain roads made the going slow, but we were able to coordinate all our stops on a pretty orderly basis and after the first few times it didn’t take long for us to line up for gas at all the available pumps at the nationalized PeMex stations and move through the refueling process fairly quickly.

As we got close to Cd. Victoria we shot off the main road to a small local restaurant for some good carne guisada (braised beef tips). It was good home food cooking because it was both a restaurant and residence. After lunch we rode through the outskirts of Cd. Victoria and on to Cd. Mantes.

Hotel Taninul in Cd. Valles

Ready To Ride

Gradually, the terrain began to change from the typical south Texas semi-arid desert to green semi-tropical surroundings. It got hot towards the end of that first day, well into the 90’s as we entered Cd. Valles. We stopped in Valles for the first night and stayed at a resort hotel named Hotel Taninul http://www.taninulhotel.com on the outskirts of town which is famous for its springs. The hotel staff was very accommodating, asking us to park our bikes under their entry veranda. For most of us, this was our first experience of traveling together in such a large group, but by natural instinct everyone went about their way, some straight to the bar, others to check in, and still others to eat. We couldn’t help notice that the hotel had a weird type of smell, not offensive, but not typical of anything. Well, we soon found out that the smell was caused by the high concentration of sulfur in the spring waters that ran right through the hotel. Cd. Valles gets many visitors who come to dip in the sulfur springs, long known as a therapeutic cure for body ailments. A few also discovered the metallurgic properties of sulfur on silver. It turns silver black, but as we later discovered on our trip it can be reversed.

Early the next morning we all had breakfast and were joined by a couple from Tampico who would lead us on our next leg, across the mountains toward San Miguel de Allende. We left the hotel at 9am and it wasn’t very long before our semi-tropical surroundings really switched to a much more tropical look. Everything was a beautiful green and plants and trees were already blooming into beautiful colors. It also was sugar cane harvest time and we would come up on slow moving trucks loaded to several times their height with sugar cane. Needless to say, we ran over a lot of sugar cane which fell from these trucks.

Tropical Highway as we head up mountains

At first we traveled on mostly beautiful rolling hills and through green pastures. As we rode, you could see off in the distance the silhouette of low hanging clouds which slowly transformed into a mountain range. It didn’t look like there was any great passage through those mountains and we soon discovered that there isn’t any.

Mountains As We Head Toward San Miguel de Allende

All of us knew that the road ahead was going to be both beautiful, but challenging. There was no disappointment. The road twisted right, left, down, up, and again though some beautiful scenery. We all felt good about the ride and making it through, looking forward to moving on to our lunch stop when our guide said the road ahead is not too far from our planned lunch stop, but that it was really a twisty road, much worse than what we had just been through! He was right. I don’t know the exact mileage, either 45 to 100 miles, but it took about two and half hours.

We finally got through the mountains and had a late lunch and we knew that we would have to really make some time to get to San Miguel before sunset. At one point we were within a hundred miles of Mexico City and then headed north toward San Luis Potosi. We made the outskirts of San Miguel right after sunset and entered the city at night with traffic bumper to bumper moving very slowly or not at all on steep cobble stone roads, not the best thing to be on after a very long day through the mountains and riding two up, but we made it through town to our hotel, Real de las Minas http://www.realdeminas.com about 7:30pm.

San Miguel de Allende is a beautiful town with plenty to see and do. Over the years it has become quite an attraction for settled-out tourists from the United States that make it their year-round home. A cab driver told us that San Miguel was at least 45% anglo. It certainly seems to be that way. With that migration the town has adapted to a higher standard of living with very good restaurants, hotels, homes, and art galleries so you won’t find great deals for a few pesos.

Yesneia & Irma

Sonia at Harley Bar

We stayed in San Miguel two nights so we could take our time seeing all of the attractions in the quaint town. My wife and I spend most the time walking through the historic churches, and the great market square. We ate lunch at a great Italian restaurant situated at the street end of an intersecting “Y” that gave us a wonderful view of daily life in San Miguel. We saw a local police officer writing a citation for a vehicle parked right in front of the restaurant on the sidewalk in what was an obvious “no parking” zone. He left the citation and removed the license plates and went on his way. We asked our waiter why they do that and he explained that you can’t drive around without plates and the only way to get them back is to go to the police station to pick them up where you’ll have to pay the fine. That makes sense. We watched as six of our bike group roared by on rented ATVs, and just people reading and going about their business in San Miguel de Allende.

The Girls at the Harley Bar in San Miguel

At night there was good number of us at the Harley Bar. The proprietor, a young man who looked like he could have belonged to the WWC federation, served up drinks to all as he traded Harley stories with anyone wanting to listen. He had his “black beauty” parked right outside his bar and he would start it up and tell us how he crossed the United States at least twice on that bike, one of three he owned. Before the night was over one of our group had commandeered the mike and was singing well into the night.

Slow Going on Way to Cd. Victoria
Mary & Jaime Pena

We left San Miguel at seven in the morning and headed back up north and eventually northeast toward Cd. Victoria. We went through quite a bit of highway under construction and it slowed us down, but we made Cd. Victoria by day’s end. We stayed right down town on the plaza square at a Hampton Inn and had a great view of the plaza. Our bikes were parked in the basement garage and we had a great evening relaxing and talking about the trip.

Our fifth and last day we left Cd. Victoria at 9am and headed north on the same highway we first took Saturday morning. We made it back to the United States by 3pm and we all headed straight to the closest What-A-Burger in Alamo for our favorite staple, hamburger and fries.

We traveled 1,300 miles in five days.