VFYW: A Bush-League View

For contest #471, we find ourselves near a prudent place.

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

From the winner of last week’s contest:

WOW! I am thrilled — this is really cool!! Have I really been playing since 2014?? I think I just got on the Correct Guesser list this year.

I have been so impressed with so many astute sleuths over the years, I will take great pride in receiving the VFYW book. This is truly a major personal highlight for me. While I haven’t submitted every single week since 2014, I did enough searching over the years to feel like this is a real accomplishment. I will treasure it.

Currently treasuring one is our recent winner in Hawaii:

The VFYW book arrived and we love it. It’s now joining our collection of coffee table books and sits in front of perhaps the best view from our window we’ve ever enjoyed:

We adore this view … watching a full moon rise over the hillside, listening to raindrops from the daily tropical storms pound the roof, and admiring the blessedly frequent horizon-to-horizon rainbows stretching over Koko Head and the Hanauma Ridge in the distance. Even our Great Pyrenees enjoys the view as she watches over the valley and ruins our sofa.

A book also just arrived for our super-sleuth in Santa Monica, who’s settling into his new home after those horrible wildfires leveled his old one — along with the VFYW book he won years ago:

The replacement book has arrived: thank you very much!

Dougal was not wildly cooperative for the photos, as his expression could hardly make clearer. But I attach Dougal, the microfiber and supposedly pet-friendly new sofa, and The View From Your Window, as well as the actual view from my window:

We are very grateful for this contribution to making four bare walls feel a bit more like a home.

That warms our collective heart. As the VFYW biologist puts it: “Count me among the folks who read every word of the Santa Monica super-sleuth’s saga, and I’m wishing for a happy ending to it for him and Dougal!”

Speaking of the wildfires, a buddy of mine I met through Substack, Rob Montz, is currently making a short documentary on the tragedy. (We met three years ago when he did a video interview with Andrew.) He’s a really talented filmmaker and storyteller, so I’m looking forward to the project — previewed here in a new Substack post. A snippet:

“Mom in front of the dirt pile and fenced-off pool that used to be our house”

I was born and raised in the Palisades. I was baptized at Palisades Lutheran Church and caught my first fly ball playing Little League in the Palisades Park. This is my homeland — and we’re working on what I hope will be the definitive take on what wiped it out, a documentary providing a detailed timeline of the fire — from spark to ruin — and identifying the precise policy failures of the city’s establishment that enabled this catastrophe.

I’ll post it when it’s live. One more catastrophe is captured by our super-sleuth in Bethlum:

I’m just mourning the loss to fire of the Grand Canyon North Rim Lodge, which we visited last fall. Cannot believe it’s gone:

We had a marvelous evening there watching the sunset from the central space, and then enjoying the moon through the window at dinner in the dining room (which is the timbered space on the left). Our view that night:

Hoping they rebuild.

On a lighter note, here’s a followup on last week’s contest from our super-sleuth in Lafayette, CA:

I can’t believe there were zero mentions last week of the great “1, 2, 3 Cancún” episode with the LA Lakers that later became a staple of Inside the NBA on TNT. Clearly the Dish audience needs a bit more culture in their lives.

I also think I saw a picture of that window last week on the BART. I need to get back on ASAP to see if I can see it again. It’s a print-only ad for Oakland Airport featuring flights to Cancún. I meant to take a picture of the ad while I was on the train, but of course I forgot by the time I got to my stop. Argh.

Another followup comes from our wine geek in San Francisco:

I really enjoyed reading the biologist’s entry about whale sharks. There is a place in the Philippines called Oslob, not too far from where Shiela is from, where you can swim with whale sharks. On one of our visits, we trekked down there to swim with them.

The guides take people out to the dive spot in outrigger canoes and you can jump in the water, if you are so inclined, while they feed the sharks. These were juveniles, so I am guessing they were about 12-15 feet long, and they look bigger in the water. Of course I hopped right in. Shiela loves the water, but is not a strong swimmer, and when she saw the size of the whale sharks and their ginormous mouths, she was a little reluctant to get in. She knew that the whale sharks didn’t eat people, but she was worried that they might just suck her in by accident. When she asked the guide about it, he laughed and said, “Don’t worry, we will pull you out.” It wasn’t exactly reassuring.

She eventually got into the water to take photos but clung tightly to the canoe the whole time. I think one other person got in the water with me. At one point, the guides started yelling at me and waving their arms and pointing behind me. Sure enough, a couple of juveniles were headed right at me, mouths agape, but they had the good sense to dive under me rather than go through me. Whew!

This was the Philippines, so there were minimal safety measures in place. You could put on a life jacket if you wanted ... or not. And I wondered if it was really good for the whale sharks to endure this kind of contact with humans. Maybe the Alaskan globetrotter will have something to say about it.

Another sleuth covers a subject near to the Dish’s heart:

I’m not guessing on any VFYW, so I’m not sure if this is useful, but I wanted you to see it because I just couldn’t help but think of you and Andrew. In the middle of nowhere in Thompson Falls, Montana is a coffee shop called Beagle Bakery, and these were on the walls inside:

As my wife and I bounce around the Mountain West chasing bike rides, we found ourselves driving from Sandpoint, Idaho to Missoula, Montana on a stunning road in a wide river valley at sunrise. Pleasant surprise to find any coffee at all out in the middle of nothing in Montana, and even more of a surprise to see the beagle cuteness.

On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in San Mateo works some magic with his “VFYW Reimagined^TM:

This week’s VFYW is an otherwise idyllic view of a small harbor. But the image is arguably spoiled by two obtrusive deck support columns and associated post-to-beam connectors on the left side. So, abracadabra!

One sleuth sees “South Haven, MI, USA”:

Michigan is the state of my birth. One day I hope to return to the city I was born in, Dearborn, and eat my way through all the delicious Middle Eastern restaurants in town.

Another sleuth also guessed South Haven. Another goes with simply, “South Shore of Long Island, NY, USA.” Our super-sleuth in Albany names the right region:

For starters, it’s very New England, with the cedar shingles and clapboard siding. The boats could indicate ocean, lake, or river. But I'm thinking coastal rather than an inland river/lake, because of the cedar shingles/clapboard siding, and because the stilts look like they are made to accommodate a rising and falling tide. Also the fishing boat is fairly hefty, like it's no stranger to the ocean. But this water is calm. So maybe a protected cove or river to the sea. In what appears to be a small but densely populated town.

From our super-sleuth in Alexandria:

Thanks for keeping us up at night googling super weird stuff. This view looks like super-iconic New England. I, like every other sleuth I’m sure, tried to read the sign on the blue-roofed structure — something like "$#2^! View Dock 1” — but I found it too window-screened blurry, so no help there.

I then looked around for other clues besides the classic A/C units or street lamps: lots of granite riprap (rather than sandy beach sediment), houses on stilts (saying it’s a tidal area), no lobster boats or traps piled up on shore (not Maine), and a wealthy-ish recreational boating feel — but not super wealthy or glitzy.

I’m going with New Hampshire (its flag has a blue background!), specifically Portsmouth.

Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome, squints:

What does this sign say, in the first line?

At first, all I could decipher was something like “Kotor New Delhi” — a most disconcerting geographical indication. After some more effort, I got the correct wording: “Harbor View Docks,” and a quick Google search revealed the location.

From a sleuth in North Andover, MA:

I rarely participate in these contests, because I never recognize anything (!), but I’m guessing this might be the view from somewhere in the vicinity of the Sandy Bay Yacht Club overlooking Rockport Harbor in Massachusetts?

As a family with (initially) young but now older (teenage) children, we’ve been making weekend expeditions to Rockport for nearly two decades at this point, always taking care to grab an ice cream treat from one of the places on Bearskin Neck before returning home. As a result of those strolls, I don’t think there’s a view from anywhere along the shoreline that hasn’t engraved itself indelibly into my memory.

But I certainly could be wrong; there are lots of cute harbor towns along the New England coast and it’s certainly possible this could be somewhere else along the coast of Maine or the Cape.

Picking the Cape, at first, was our super-sleuth in Bethlum:

My first thought was P-town, as it’s been a while since we were there (contest #260). But no, a different type of harbor here — closer in and more sheltered. Still, this is New England at her finest.

Circling the right window, per usual, is Chini:

This next sleuth names the right state:

Frustrated by this one. The architecture puts us somewhere on the East Coast and likely in New England. The marina looks like it has a floating dock, so this is likely a tidal body of water. The flag at the top edge of the image is probably a state flag, and within New England, Rhode Island and Massachusetts have white flags, so they’re out. New Hampshire’s short coastline doesn’t have many inlets or coves. Connecticut seemed like a good possibility, but while it has plenty of narrow inlets with small marinas, none of them looked right for this image.

Somewhere in Maine? I don’t have time to search its 3,400-mile coastline, so I’m just going to throw up my hands and say it’s Crabapple Cove. Better luck next time.

Also guessing Maine is a sleuth in Sebastopol, CA:

Looks like coastal Maine, but not sure which town. The far boat looks like a Maine fishing boat hull.

Here’s how the A2 Team got there:

The overexposure gives this photo a flair of the South, but the architecture points to the North, as confirmed by the blue flag of Maine, of which we see a sliver in the top right. As I just wrote the other day, searching for marinas in Greece and Turkey did not get us to Aegina, but marinas.com has a nice list for Maine, with photos, which brought our place up on the second page of 15 — Performance Marine Inc:

From the Lafayette sleuth again:

This week’s solve was kind of cool. I kind of figured it was somewhere in New England (but the Great Lakes also seemed possible). I followed the blue boat in the middle of the picture, which says Cobra, and can be found here. The owners live on Burnt Mill Road in Wells, ME, and the nearest somewhat similar harbor to what we see in the picture is Kennebunkport. Looks like we’re in the building with the Kennebunkport Brewing Company. I wonder if George HW Bush was a regular there?

Berkeley clarifies which town:

I’m glad you resisted siccing Dusty on that blue fishing boat’s transom.