A monthly drone park gathering gets buzzing in Soledad.

It’s a clear, crisp winter day with virtually unlimited visibility up and down the Salinas Valley. Driving up through Soledad, past vineyards and turning toward the west entrance to Pinnacles National Park, a road veers off, with small stretches of old pavement broken up by packed dirt and rock. Along the way there’s a neon piece of construction paper tacked to a fence. Written in black marker are the words “Drone Park.”

Further up the hill, a rusted-out trailer appears to the right, with a ramshackle corral to the left with a few sleepy horses. Just beyond is a makeshift picnic area and drone launch area where Marco Garcia is playing host to the Monterey County Drone Meetup Group.

On this Sunday afternoon, the meetup is small, just Garcia and a few newcomers. One of the men in the group, Lars Ladewig, an IT professional from San Luis Obispo, starts up his 5-inch black Alien drone. It whirs like an angry hornet.

“Just the sound of them is exhilarating,” Garcia exclaims as the small drone takes off like a shot up the hill.

“It’s an experience like nothing else when you’re flying up there FPV (first-person view),” says Ladewig, who wears goggles that allow him to see what his drone sees. “It’s addicting.”

Monterey County Drone Meetup got its start last August with 15 people; it meets about once a month, depending on weather and Garcia’s schedule. The group currently has about 85 members registered on meetup.com, attracting people from all over the Central Coast and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Members test out their drones, race each other, and just geek out, shooting the breeze with Garcia, owner of a drone device manufacturing company called Drone 18. The meetups are free, including the sausages Garcia cooks on a portable grill, served with chips and soda.

On Garcia’s 300-acre ranch, with sweeping views of the Salinas Valley below, participants fly their drones unencumbered by Federal Aviation Administration safety rules that restrict flying over homes and people without permission, or flying within a five-mile range of an airport.

For now, the drone park consists of two launchpads – stacked tires topped with plywood with an orange cloth “X” tacked down to each – and some obstacles in a field, like PVC pipe arbors to fly through, and a set of older non-operational wind turbines atop a nearby hill, used to practice tower inspections.

Garcia, however, has big plans for his drone park. They range from opening it up for law enforcement to practice drone maneuvers to inviting students in to get them excited about science and technology. And plans are in the works for a TV show that resembles Battlebots for drones, complete with buzz saws and other catastrophic obstacles sure to see some sparks fly.

Garcia recently received his first patent for something he thinks will be huge: the first safe, collapsible, reusable piñata. He also created a database of Mexican manufacturers at fatkikis.com – named after his rotund cat.

“I think of the craziest stuff,” Garcia says. “I tell people outside of the Silicon Valley my ideas and they think I’m crazy. I tell people inside Silicon Valley my ideas and they steal them.”

Garcia, who splits his time between San Mateo, Soledad, Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana, is waiting on more patents for drone devices he recently invented. One device called Bird Ghost frightens birds using sounds, like predator bird calls, and frequencies birds don’t like. Another device, the Termite Terminator, emits frequencies that “cooks” termites, he says.

Born in Mexico City, Garcia came to the U.S. with his parents at 6 months old. The family settled in San Mateo, where the young Garcia was prone to taking things apart trying to figure out how they worked. He studied engineering at the University of Colorado, but instead of going to work in tech, Garcia opted to go into real estate to make money to finance more tinkering.

For Garcia, the devices are just part of what’s pulling him in. He also enjoys all the people he meets, like Ladewig, and another meetup member there that day, Monterey resident Gene Felten.

While Ladewig loves racing his mini-drone, Felten, an engineer and amateur photographer, says he’s in it more for the aerial photography and videography; he’s contemplating becoming a commercial real estate drone videographer.

Both Felten and Ladewig say they’ll be back to Garcia’s drone park, and Ladewig says he’ll be bringing along friends he knows from a Facebook drone group he belongs to.

For Garcia, the more the merrier.

“We tell everyone, bring your dogs, bring your kids, bring your friends,” he says. “This is our playground.”

For more about the MONTEREY COUNTY DRONE GROUP, visit www.meetup.com/Monterey-county-drones