Oak Creek canyon

After leaving the Painted Desert we travelled West on the I 40 (ex route 66) to Winslow (made famous by the Eagles song) and camped at the Homoluvi Ruins State Park (they do have some strange names). This was a very basic, no facility, windy, open and expensive campground, which we do not recommend.
From Winslow we travelled about 30 miles to Meteor Crater, one of the wonderful natural features that I have wanted to visit for many years. 50,000 years ago a meteor 150 feet across crashed into Arizona making a crater nearly a mile wide and 350 feet deep. We climbed to the rim and looked down on a very impressive sight. We also had the chance to find out more about meteors and meteorites. It was a fascinating morning.
We drove on through the desert to Flagstaff. We were impressed by the number of volcanic cones that could be seen, straight ahead was the bulk of the San Francisco Mountains, near Flagstaff. There we turned south towards Sedona. Following the advice of our friends Dorothy and John we took the 89 South. This runs quite normally until it hits Oak Creek Canyon. The road goes into it from the top, north end, as a nice flat normal road, then via a switchback it drops 800ft over 1000yards (as the crow files) into a narrow canyon, no more that 200yards wide, with 800ft walls. The amazing thing is that the canyon is full of ponderosa pine trees, it is a forest in the middle of a desert. It has a lovely winding stream which becomes a river and alongside the river, it the middle of the forest is a lovely campground. As soon as we arrived we found all sorts of new birds flying around the place. We have seen Acorn Woodpeckers, Bullocks Orioles, Redstart, Robins, Stellar Jay, Cow Birds, to name a few. I have even managed to get some good photos of many of these birds. We even hung out our Hummingbird feeder and lo and behold within minutes we had hummingbirds feeding. Needless to say we have stayed here for four days, instead of our original two and had a lovely time, we have also met a few really nice people as well. Today, Saturday, we took a short trip down the canyon, only to be surprised by the scale and beauty of the rock walls on either side, as well as the large number of people out for the day (This place is one of the few places in Arizona that you can picnic in the trees and swim in a river). We are now preparing to make the last leg of our journey, from here to Banning in California, which we think will take us three days.