Bang. Everything goes dark the moment after I see a flash across the night sky. The power is out. There’s no light from lamp posts or the supermarkets lining the street, just a trail of red taillights leading up the hill ahead of me and white, blinding headlights oncoming. Then the strangest thing happened, the lights started to part. Was I Moses?
Nope.
The majority of vehicles ahead had opted to pull in after the lights went out due to the ferocity of the water coming down the hill. So, no, the sea didn’t part for me, quite the opposite; it was forming. And I say “hill”, but without sounding overly dramatic, this was the steepest gradient I’d ever climbed on a public road. As horrible as you think this situation was, it was worse.
At that moment, on a shiny new Vespa GTS 300 Supertech, which also had my girlfriend on the back, I needed to decide if it was safe, or rather safe enough, to keep going. The problem wasn’t so much the unknown of the road and weather ahead, but rather the known danger of pulling over.
Photo by: Robbie Bacon
We were in a part of Mexico City that you couldn’t pay me to walk around, much less pull over and sit atop the equivalent of the Bentley of scooters in that area. Unfortunately, Google Maps redirected me via my Cardo due to road closures, and before I realized it, we were in deep, too deep for me to pull over and use my phone to reroute us out of there—that would’ve put a sign on my back saying “Please rob me.”
All I could do was go forward. I went forward when a lightning strike took out all the lights on the road. I went forward when the cars ahead pulled over due to the height of what I could only call a “road river”. I went forward when my helmet fogged up so badly that I had to alternate the visor position to make it so I was either being hit by thousands of freezing pin-like drops of water, or half-blind due to the condensation.
After years of riding motorcycles through so much of the world, and getting into situations that only I could get myself out of, I’d strengthened my perseverance no end, but I only became self-aware about that on this Vespa trip. It wasn’t until we managed to get out of the craziness, had an Airbnb cancel on us last minute, and finally hunkered down in a cheap motel that I realized it.
My partner thanked me for taking control of the situation as I had done for the past few hours and getting us to safety, and that’s when I realized: I don’t know if I would’ve acted the same way 10 or even five years ago. I’ve been through so many desperate situations on two wheels, whether it be crashes, breakdowns, getting lost, flat tires in the middle of a blistering hot day somewhere in Tequila, or riding through temperatures so cold that I need to pull over because I can’t use the clutch or brake levers anymore.
All of these situations and many more have a compounding effect and help you realize that you can’t stop, no one is coming for you, so you have to keep moving forward. That’s the reason I’m happy that I didn’t find myself in this situation 10 years ago, because I’d understand anyone who would’ve found it too difficult to process.
The further I delved into my motorcycling adventures and struggles, the more times I found perseverance. Think about it, just to learn how to change gears on a motorcycle while overcoming target fixation takes a helluva lot of perseverance, and your two-wheeled adventures are only beginning at that point.
Although it’s only one of many behavioural benefits to living a life on two wheels, it’s one that’s not spoken about much, so this is my thank you to motorcycles and motorcycling for teaching me to keep moving forward with laser-like focus when needed. And a hat tip to a Vespa that challenged me by almost saying, “If I can get through this, you certainly can.” That GTS 300 platform is a sleeper, but more on that later.
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