Day 2 started with a glorious sunny day in LA. It’s like the rain never happened.

The cosplay here is often genius and sometimes very simple. Look vaguely like Amy Pond & Vincent Van Gogh? Well, just get your clothes the right colour, get a hat & grow a beard and you’re transformed into two stars of one the best Doctor Who episodes around – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_and_the_Doctor. Superb.

Nasa is always a favourite of ours, especially for Allan. This year gave us an update on the latest Mars rover with the backdrop of how close the LA fires got to NASA’s JPL. Sounded a scary time for employees and challenging logistics for probes that need to receive a signal from base every 5 days otherwise they go into standby. We also find out that a NASA mainstay, Dr Kim Steadman, is leaving NASA in a couple of days to help design the octocopter for the mission to Titan. Cool or what?  She’s promised to still come to Gally to keep us updated – most excellent.

Next up was a talk by an ex-military intelligence Brit titled “Double-o-Who: Doctor Who and Spying”. This went through the similarities between Doctor Who and James Bond & the wider intelligence community. An excellent montage at the start showed how many time the Doctor has been accused of being a spy. Interesting talk.

Mark Sheppard gave us an all too brief 30 minutes on the life, universe and everything. We found out that he tried to persuade his late dad to play his older self and also how he almost broke (read: absolutely did break) a filming contract to join the Doctor who cast for an episode. 

Katherine Tate gave us an hour’s worth of entertainment including half hour of taking questions about her time as Donna. Trying to persuade us that she was indeed the first woman Doctor Who and her “nan” character was a combination of numerous people she knew. 

I’ll leave you with a very pink K9

About the only non airport hotel restaurant, apart from Denny’s, near to us is a little Greek taverna called Aliki’s. It’s Valentine’s day so a nice Greek meal was in order with Greek salad, spanakopita, saganaki and, of course on this particular day, Moussaka.

The worst headline pun of the holiday? 176 days to go to beat it.

Gally is a wonderful thing.

Where else would you find cosplay of some great characters (Davros, Donna and Wilf amongst many others), discover how Doctor Who directors & camera crew do their stuff, learn whether Tosin & Pearl like a Saturday night in or out, be taught about the new space telescope, enjoy a cross over talk to see which Doctor Who worlds are physically possible exo-Planets from NASA scientists and see a Mars 2020 rover wheel?

And yes, in the bottom left picture, that is a real life Mars rover wheel they used in testing. How exciting is that?!

Allan kicked off the Valentine’s Day celebrations with possibly the most romantic card ever: a piece of the old Marriott LAX carpet that has been the background for so many Gally memories. A new carpet this year is the cause of much angst. It’s ironic that so many Doctor Who fans struggle with change.

The Marriott patio is swarming with Doctors, River Songs, Bills and Ponds. This year, there’s also a sprinkling of Crowleys and Aziraphales.

We’re playing Doctor Bingo – first one to collect all thirteen gets a cocktail of their choice. Nine to Thirteen are well represented, but Chloë is still searching for the elusive Three (Pertwee), while Alan needs a Two (Troughton). We’ll both struggle to find an Eight (McGann), partly because he’s so easily confused with others.

We have one important task today. Our goddaughter is worried about Bill. She had a horrible time with the Cybermen before Heather whisked her off into the universe. Is she OK? Is Heather being nice to her? We reckon this reassuring message was worth the hour’s queuing. Turns out Heather is treating her like the queen she is.

The big room interview we choose for today is Tosin Cole (Ryan). He’s new to the convention scene and is charmingly unaffected. He fell into acting when a girl he liked invited him to come to a workshop. It turned out he was pretty good and, more importantly, found a place where he could explore different sides of himself. He was very honest about loving the attention and applause he gets on stage. In a few years he’ll have a store of funny, polished anecdotes, so we’re glad to have seen him simply enjoying all the new experiences.

While Allan marvelled at the future of flight with Dr Anita Sengupta, Chloë sloped off to one of her favourite Gally staples, In Defence Of. Two players each have one minute to defend something generally considered to be indefensible (eg Adric’s pyjamas) and it’s run by the Verity! podcast team. This year ended with the two players leading the crowd in a rousing rendition of Defying Gravity. No one can remember what they were defending…

We end the day with Paul Cornell’s always entertaining Deathmatch. This year, every Classic Series script editor/producer and every New Series showrunner were ruthlessly pitted against one another in sudden death votes to find out who was (scientifically) the best. The winner was Terrance Dicks, to the general delight of all.

Finally, a romantic dinner at the surprisingly good hotel restaurant. Giant prawns, steak and an excellent Malbec: what’s not to love?

The Getty Centre looms large on a hill over the I405 motorway with sweeping views to LA and beyond akin to Blofeld’s secret base. Approaching the buildings via a monorail just adds to the James Bond theme.

With three hours to kill before check-in to our base for the Doctor Who convention, it’s the perfect place to come and be wowed with what almost unlimited money can buy.

Building infrastructure made from Italian marble quarries that took 2 years to get here, huge quantity of artwork that has famous names everywhere and gardens that shine brightly with vivid colours. It’s all here. We walk through the gardens, we take in a highlights tour and enjoy the views.

But there’s also more contemporary stuff. A small exhibition of excellent photos taken by ten LA high school students – #LAunshuttered – was a highlight amongst the giants of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Turner.

https://www.getty.edu/visit/cal/events/ev_2790.html

The journey back was with a character of a LA taxi driver telling us how patient drivers are here, the wonders of Mexican food and to never come to LA in June – apparently the only month where the sun doesn’t shine, so everyone is a miserable sod.

We finished with proper US diner food at Denny’s and registration for the convention. Let the nerdness begin!!

Where does a billionaire with an unrivalled collection of antiquities keep them? Why, he builds an architecturally authentic Roman villa, complete with manicured gardens, olive and pine trees, and its own amphitheater, of course.

The Getty Villa is breathtaking in its scale, location and beauty. What’s inside beats it all. Hands down.

We’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of relics from European and Middle Eastern civilisations: Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Assyrian. We’ve seen them in the places they were uncovered and we’ve seen them in the British Museum (of Stolen Goods). We’ve never seen anything like this.

You’re familiar with the general look of such antiquities, right? Statues with missing heads, toes, noses. Pottery shards, faded and cracked. Tiny votive offerings of distorted or worn away figures. The inevitable passage of time does its work on all material objects.

Well, we’ve got news. Those missing noses? Those broken off toes? Not inevitable at all. They are not a necessary characteristic of ancient artefacts, it’s just that the billionaires got the good stuff already. All of the noses are here!

Frankly, we think the photos speak for themselves. We spent a fortune on taxis, but the villa is free to get in.

Short of paying proper taxes, this might be one of the better things a billionaire can do with his money.

We had many plans for today but jet lag continues to hit Chloë hard. So instead we did some washing, ate noodles and watched many episodes of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. We are on holiday, after all.