I got one a couple of years ago, a little Syma X-5 with a (crap) camera.
I used it for getting footage of a piece of land I was managing to help monitor tree growth, etc. (honest! I wasn't 'just' playing with it!)
Some of the trees around the boundaries are quite mature... so it'll probably be no surprise that a sudden gust of wind left the damned thing hanging in the very top of a large Sycamore tree.
I then spent the next 5 hours trying to retrieve it. First, by getting the longest pole I could manage to try to reach it (cutting down, trimming a willow... lashing willows together etc.) then throwing things at it (sticks, rocks, gardening tools...) then progressing to long lengths of twine with various weights on the end, whirled around my head and thrown at it, all comically unsuccessful.
Eventually, drawing on hours of (what I had until then thought to have been 'misspent') youth, I decided to make a bow and arrow to shoot the twine over it...
The first bow was just crap. The second snapped. But the third... serviceable for my purposes.
The string tied to the arrow needed to be laid out perfectly so it didn't snag, which took a few attempts to get right... finally, I managed to get the string shot through the tree just under where the quadcopter was dangling, and after some precision 'jiggling', I managed to twang the little bastard free! Well, free enough to bounce onto the next branch down. But encouraged by this success, I persevered... until finally...
finally... it was back in my hands.
Then it hit me: I'd had a lot more fun getting it out of the tree than I'd ever had
flying it.
