Day 180 of 365

It's a bird... It's a plane... It's a Parrot?

I've had expectations for this experience and I think I set myself up to fail. It's 6:15 am and my little experiment for day 180 is charging in the kitchen. My heart is racing with excitement and I'm so impatient.

That's when reality hits.

My adventure for the day was to fly my very first drone. I've done a little research and shopped around for months. On a whim I stumbled upon this tiny Parrot Mambo. It's got a 10 minute flight time and will shoot 720p video. The price was pretty great so I decided to make it the adventure for today.

It came charged but I still hooked it and the controller to power and topped each device off. I wanted to use my phone as an alternate controller so I downloaded the app for that. You can not fly a drone out of the box. There is pairing, and syncing and ALWAYS a software update. Thirty minutes later I was almost ready for my first flight.

"Device not found" Really?

I shut everything down, just like rebooting a wireless router and BINGO we were in business.

This little drone is pretty versatile. It has a bunch of add-ons at a reasonable price. If I can get it to work properly I might get the "NERF" dart attachment.

Back to my first flight. It wasn't anything to celebrate and all I could get it to do was hover. Just as an FYI it does this no matter what. I was getting a tiny bit impatient as none of the controller options would connect with the device. Another reboot of the drone and it finally connected to the wireless controller that it came with.

Mission control, we have lift off!

Houston we have a problem...

After all of that hovering the battery went into critical levels and my drone dropped like a rock. I think the "drone gods" are laughing at me because I tried to squeeze this adventure in at 6:30 in the morning. I wanted that sunrise shot.

Kelly Branyik from @travelbranyik was with me and took some pretty cool first flight pics. She also reminded me that every sunrise will eventually bring a sunset. What a little ball of sunshine she is.

My drone never flew again. If you're shopping for one you'll need to make sure it has auto- stabilization because without it you might hit a barn or something like that.

As experiences go I had hoped this would open the door to drone use on future adventures. This went back in the box and back to the store.

Day 180 was amazing for almost a full minute.

Love & Light