We’re properly on the road again now, having covered another 345 miles through Arizona from Flagstaff 
to Tucson via “Meteor Crater” 
.
Meteor Crater is about 3/4 mile in diameter and formed 50,000 years ago by a meteor travelling an estimated 26,000 miles per hour. It sticks out like a sore thumb in the surrounding Arizona desert which is flat for hundreds of miles.
I hope the photos convey how big it really looks. I realise it is much, much smaller than the Grand Canyon where we were yesterday (the Grand Canyon is around 260 miles long), but there was something astonishing about standing on the edge of a crater formed by something  from outer space. Not only were we allowed to stand right on the rim, but the attached museum had real fragments of the meteor which you could touch and lift up (it’s much heavier tan normal rock!), along with lots of interactive exhibits and an excellent film about the formation and geology of the crater, as well and how it came to be discovered and preserved.
It was also interesting to hear how the crater was used as a training ground by NASA astronauts because the floor of it is so similar to the moon. Many well known astronauts like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell trained there and equipment like the moon buggy was also tested there.
This might be controversial, but we were more impressed by the Meteor Crater than the Grand Canyon. Learning about how meteorites have shaped the solar system, killed off the dinosaurs and even created the Moon by smashing up the Earth certainly makes you feel small.
Our trip to the Meteor Crater also took us onto “historic” Route 66 , just for a few miles so we got to see a bit of the craziness associated with one of America’s first highways.