Arizona continued

After leaving our new friends at Queen Valley,

we restocked for gas and groceries and made our way around Phoenix and up the I-17 heading to Sedona. It was Saturday morning and it seemed like everyone in Phoenix was going our way for the weekend. Even before we came to the Village of Oak Creek traffic ground to a crawl but at least we had the beautiful view of the red rocks to entertain us as we moved slowly from one round about to another.
At least the slow travel speeds made it easy to get our first glimpses and orientation to Sedona as we passed through. We eventually made our way up the very scenic and twisty Hwy 89 through the Oak Creek canyon to our campsite for the next two nights at the National Forest Cave Springs campsite. The full sign was out so it was a good thing we had reservations (only a few sites are reservable). On the Saturday the campground was teeming with families, mostly tenting, on a weekend getaway from Phoenix. This campground had a more familiar feel, lots of trees around the sites and lots of kids running around, if felt like a BC Parks in July. We even had our first campfire of the trip; a very small bundle of firewood for $7.00 not Blanket Creek standards by any means.
After a leisurely Sunday morning start we headed off in the van down 89 towards Sedona. Our first stop was at Slide Rock State Park. The highlight here is watching the young, hardy souls leaping into the still frigid pools of the Oak Creek amidst the setting of the surrounding red rocks.

We continued along into the heart of touristy Sedona, the place was still jammed with weekenders, and picked up a map of the main viewpoints from the visitors' centre. Some of the best views were from up on the Airport Rd.

 

We made a stop at the Chapel of the Holy Cross (after a bit of a wait for parking). Again more gorgeous views and when I popped into the church I found a couple of  large tapestries hanging on the wall.

We drove back into town and stopped at Tlaquepaque Plaza, a collection of galleries, shops and restaurants on a Mexican village theme, built around four courtyards with fountains and sculpture installations. A charming cooler stop especially as the crowds were starting to thin out.

We returned to our campsite about 4:30pm and were immediately visited by the camp host as we were unloading.  Turns out while we were out enjoying our day they were dealing with a propane gas leak from our trailer which he deemed to be so severe he called in the Fire Marshall. They turned off our tanks, which turned off our stove, fridge, and hot water. We were able to run the generator for about 5 hrs to keep the fridge cold, cooked dinner on the BBQ, and diagnosed that the problem was a faulty regulator on the propane tanks. So after a chilly start to a Monday morning, a cold breakfast and NO COFFEE we had an early start North to Flagstaff where we we fortunate to find an RV service/parts place that had just opened at 8:00am, confirmed our suspicions about the regulator, had the part and could get the work done right away so we were back on the road for our longest driving day of the trip by 9:30am.