Berridale Trip - Day 5

Day 5 – 17/4/2017 – Berridale/Cooma Day

It turned out to be a pretty cool night. It dropped to 2.5deg C! I hadn’t really noticed when I was out taking photos around the place even though I was still in a short sleeved shirt and shorts with only a vest jumper on. It was a great testament to the warming properties of the beer cloak!  The morning was also just right for a few more photos!

First activity for the morning was to test out the active tracking function of the drone. The drone was only a few weeks old so I hadn’t had an opportunity to test many of the functions at all yet. And there were plenty of willing participants to be tracked!  But first some photos.

Getting ready to track

It seems to work best when the subject is not moving too fast. Below are some videos of the results.

After playing around with the active tracking for about half an hour some of Lisa and Ian’s friends were leaving so we tried to use the follow me function to film them leaving. I was riding pillion on the quad bike with the controller. The drone followed us for about 50 to 100m but I am not sure what happened after that. I am not sure if the controller that I had lost GPS signal or the drone lost a visual on us but it just stopped and hovered while we were still heading away from it. I finally realised that it wasn’t following us so I jumped off and tried to find it. By this time, I was about 500m away from it. By the time that I had run back towards its location the battery was getting very low and it initiated its return to home function. I was a bit worried about that as where it had initially taken off from was in amongst a few trees and buildings and I hadn’t really tested the return to home and obstacle avoidance functionality yet and didn’t really want too with a battery that was quickly running out. So I cancelled the return to home and just managed to find a flat clear spot in the tall grass to manually land it. Phew, crisis adverted!

After that bit of excitement the rest of the morning was spent helping pack up everything as everyone had left or was leaving. It was only going to be us, Lisa and Nelson left for the next couple of days.

We went into Cooma for a late lunch at “The Lot” café. We had found the café on a previous trip to Cooma but never really had a chance to stop in. Mental note, don’t go to a popular café on a day that is at the end of an extra long weekend! It was absolutely chock a block with people and hard to get a table. The whole town was busy. It was due to everyone is leaving Jindabyne, Thredbo and the other little towns in the region and heading back to Canberra and Sydney! Earlier in the morning we had already received reports from the first family that had left that there was a traffic jam going through the centre of Cooma.

After lunch, we did a quick shop at Woolies to stock up on a few groceries before we headed around to a friend’s place for afternoon tea. We were catching up with some old friends from Rockhampton that we hadn’t seen for several years. It was great catching up with Tania and Gareth and to see how Gareth has been keeping himself busy with the never-ending house extensions. When we get around to visiting them again in a few years’ time it wouldn’t surprise me if Gareth had started building a second floor onto the house!

After saying our goodbyes we headed back to Berridale and The Farm. We made it back just in time for me to try some afternoon drone photos and videos.

With everyone gone, we spent the night inside the house with the inside fire going. While I was inspecting the drone footage of the day Jodie and Lisa caught up on sister stuff.