(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.)
What a great way to start a day! Thanks Chris, I really love this contest, and I’m so glad y’all have kept treating us with weekly puzzles for so long! I think my first (unsubmitted) correct window was in Colombia back in 2010. Being back in the weekly fold has been a blast!
From the submitter of last week’s view (the Alaskan globetrotter):
Thanks again for your curated submissions on the Jomtien Hotel. We believe one can extract great enjoyment from a trip even after you come home, as you learn more about a place. It’s kind of like revisiting, and it creates mental lists for the next trip.
We were especially interested in the shocking details about the 1997 fire that took 91 lives at the exact hotel where we stayed. We cluelessly had no idea that such an event had occurred. I’m not sure how we would have known, even after arrival, because there is no obvious memorial. But like many Thai hotels, there are lots of shrines around, and maybe one is dedicated to the dead. We would like to be able to report weird dreams, or run-ins with ghosts of staff or previous guests, but unless they were blending in with the gangs of Chinese tourists following their flag-waving tour leaders back and forth to the tour buses, we decided they were hanging out in the main building where the fire occurred.
A recent winner has a fantastic followup:
I wish I had figured out last week’s view, because I’ve actually been to Pattaya Beach … waaay back in 1984. I was going to be trekking in Nepal for two weeks over the Christmas holidays, and I’d asked my travel agent (who was also a member of the trekking group) to book me on a beach somewhere for a few days after the trip. She chose Pattaya Beach.
For the Berkeley champ, who can most relate to this experience, here’s my 1984 shot of parasailing over Pattaya Beach:
It’s really incredible how well-traveled Dish readers are. Another example comes from the super-sleuth in Toronto:
Hi there! It’s been a while since I submitted an entry. Whereas Pattaya is a place I haven’t traveled to in 20 years, I visited this week’s location much more recently. Four months ago I shot a photo of the spot, I believe — this yellow arrow points to the place hidden behind some hills:
The super-chef in Tucson has a followup on the impossible view from two contests ago:
I meant to say last week that winning the VFYW by noting the characteristic color of the harmattan was the coolest use of a clue ever. And I find Giuseppe’s streak of 97 truly impressive. I think I might have the distinction of having the shortest streak belonging to a super-champ: eight. Inspired by the Austin mixologist’s call for a reset, I’m going to stop missing windows and taking breaks and see if I can improve on that streak. And I plan to use Giuseppe’s definition of a streak as referring to the building, not the window. I didn’t bother to find the building last week — I had a food column to write, for chrissakes! — so my streak starts today.
The super-champ in Berkeley also gets meta:
It felt like the mulligan idea for the Ouagadougou view was getting decent buy-in last week, but a dissenting view was heard from the super-mixologist, and Giuseppe seemed not to be picking up his option, so I hope you’ll let me attempt to clarify what I had in mind. (And no, I wasn’t just trying to cling onto my own precious streak out of cussedness; I intended to take the damn mulligan with or without permission.) It just didn’t seem fair that the contest would be judged to be a mass crap-out on everyone’s part, because if 100% of contestants (including Chini) are unable to identify a view in a particular photo, then the failure should properly be attributed to the photo itself, not to the contestants. No one should be penalized for failing to do the impossible.
If the term mulligan doesn’t sit right — maybe because it smacks of playing fast and loose with the strict rules of golf — then how about this: impossible-to-identify views are so rare (right now they constitute 0.48% of the total) that we ought to just treat them as hors-série (special issues). For example, when I was a kid and an issue of a comic book had a plot that violated the series’s overall logic or story arc, it would be called an “imaginary novel” — Lex Luthor is Clark Kent’s brother; Jimmy Olsen gets sold into slavery on a nonsensical planet; Lois marries Batman, etc. They aren’t taken seriously.
I agree with the Austin mixologist that it’s good (or at least not a bad thing) to have a streak reset from time to time, but not if a reset means breaking the streaks of everyone everywhere all at once. A reset needs to be the result of an individual’s struggle against too difficult a challenge — not the inevitable result of everyone kamikaze-ing against an impossible one. However short or long a sleuth’s streak might be, whether it’s two contests or 97, we all assign at least some value to them. I’m sure when you decided to use the Ouagadougou view for the contest you weren’t picturing yourself throwing the main circuit breaker and simultaneously snapping all the ongoing streaks of all VFYW sleuths. To the best of my knowledge you aren’t a psychopath. You aren’t Thanos with his infinity gauntlet (“I am inevitable”):
You aren’t The Joker:
It seems to me the argument that “there’s no way for you to know if a window is impossible in advance” is both incorrect and irrelevant. It’s incorrect because when the Ouagadougou photo was posted it came with a warning: “Proximity counts! It might be the only way to win this one this week” (suggesting you already had a strong suspicion it would be impossible); and because the submitter at least twice used that word in referring to it. But the argument from advance knowledge is irrelevant anyway. A view demonstrates itself to be impossible if and when at midnight on Wednesday every damn one of us has come up with bupkis.
In other words, in every case of a proven impossible view, a proximity guess can win it, but no one can lose it. It automatically becomes hors-série. So far as I’m concerned, Giuseppe’s current streak is still purring along at 99 (because I’m sure he’s managed to find the room above the parking lot in this week’s view). Next week he’ll undoubtedly hit 100, and regardless of his assertion about the silliness of fixating on round numbers, 100 is better than 97. It just is. And he’ll have earned it.
A bittersweet followup comes from the super-sleuth in Clinton, CT:
Well, it’s certainly great to be back in the hunt again after a long — but never long enough — vacation in Europe. I’ll send some potentially useful pics within the week. Last week’s view got away from me, unfortunately, as I did locate Pattaya before the deadline, but frankly I neglected to get a submission off in time. I’m still wading through a several hundred photographs of our time away and taking care of some rather unpleasant things that hit us upon our return.
Unfortunately, the flooded basement we had to deal with was only the second worst thing. Two days later, we had to say goodbye rather unexpectedly to our dear boy, our chocolate lab, Sullivan:
I’ve previously included a mention of him in at least one submission, telling you that he was, indeed, named after Andrew (with the idea that another would be named Hitchens). Well, Hitchens never happened, as Sullivan proved to be all we really wanted in a dog. He was always the silly puppy that arrived in our home over 11 years ago. It was a sudden spinal lesion that our vet said he would never recover from that caused his untimely demise, and it was one of the most gut-wrenching decisions we’ve made.
So, if can’t include a quick nod to Sully in the blog, if you’d at least do me the favor of passing along that photo to Andrew, I’d be forever grateful.
Sent to Andrew and thousands of sympathetic sleuths. Rest in peace.
Here’s a view from a fellow Burner:
I’m currently in Crested Butte with three other Bahs burners (multiple iterations, and all of us met Andrew the first year he went to Burning Man):
It’s the first time here for all of us, and it’s an amazing mountain. We lucked out: blue skies and fresh powder for our first day. Another storm is on its way, so it’s a great way to end the season!
Speaking of Colorado, that’s where the following sleuth figures this week’s view is located:
At first glance, I thought this looked like portions of the American West in the Rockies. But then I saw the look of that white truck in the field and the license plates on the cars, which appeared to me to be the elongated European variety. Those things sidetracked me for way too long, looking at Scottish and Irish charter bus companies trying to find the design that appears on those buses and googling where snow-capped mountains are in Ireland. But the landscape looks too dry for that, and the architecture sure looks American. Then I realized that those probably are American license plates, but either because of the angle at which the photo was taken or a slight distortion in the picture, they only look elongated.
I feel like I’ve seen places like this all over the American West, but I can’t find anything in the view to help me narrow things down more closely than somewhere in Colorado, or Wyoming, or maybe Idaho. (That tall entryway to something in the distance seems like it should be significant.) I so wanted to get this view, but I’ll go with somewhere in the mountains in central Colorado.
Heading west is the UWS super-sleuth:
I’m basically stumped. We’re in the middle of nowhere (spoken like a life-long urbanite), and yet there are tour buses. So something of interest is going on here. At first I thought: Hey, there’s a UFO in this photo, so it must be Area 51! OK, I know it’s not a UFO. But I admit to actually following that hunch.
How about the buses? Nope. Apparently white background + dark red and purple curvy designs = a huge percentage of all tour buses. I won’t bore you with the other rabbit holes I went down, and will just give this totally wild guess: somewhere in Utah.
Another jumps to Asia:
I didn’t find time to do a full search this week, but the terrain reminds me of rural South Korea. The white Hyundai truck in the photo is also very common there with farmers and shop owners, although Wikipedia tells me it is sold in several other countries as well.
I’ll throw my dart at Sokcho, which is a great jumping off point to hike Seoraksan National Park. I stayed there back in 2010 as part of a road trip from Busan up Korea’s east coast with a few friends. It was fun to get away from the cities and meet people who didn't regularly interact with foreigners. Several oversized Americans attracted a lot of attention from the locals in some of those small towns, especially once they realized we spoke a little Korean. Great times, and a beautiful place to visit.
The view is indeed a national park, but not in Asia. Here’s the super-sleuth in San Mateo with his creative interpretation of the view:
This week the poorly paved parking lot and water (?) tower across the street caught my eye, so I’m exaggerating them for the VFYW Reinterpreted #414. I was also intrigued by the CTR logo that’s on the satellite dish, so I added it to the water tower:
Here’s Team Bellevue with a slew of clues:
QUICK READS
Initial gut instinct: feels almost American, but license plates feel too wide
Satellite dish with branding
Tourist destination with bus parking
Speaking of parking, wow, that’s a lot of compact SUVs
Some steeply angled solar panels; we’re not at the equator
Giant signage across the road saying “Welcome”? Are we on the inside or outside of that?
DIGGING DEEPER
We start off in two directions, the satellite dish, and the buses. The satellite dish says “CTB,” or is that “CTR,” or maybe “CTA”? We don’t turn up immediate gold, but it’s maybe five minutes before we find the logo we’re looking for:
Giuseppe also focused on the satellite dish, though his eyes did wander:
A fairly easy view this week, but there were some complications. There aren’t too many places with barren hills and lots of horses. The key clue would be the satellite dish with the acronym CTR, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a straightforward reference (others may have been luckier), so I had to google “CTR” and “(name of the country)”, so it only served to confirm a guess I had made. Even then, knowing the country, I struggled to find the exact location. While browsing the results of my last query with no apparent results, I paused for a moment to check out a detail — not strictly, ehr, relevant to my search — appearing in this photo:
I went to the website the photo came from and had a glance at a pair of other pictures and suddenly realized I had found the spot I was looking for. Talk about serendipity!
A previous winner also came upon that fetching photo during his successful search for this week’s window:
I must admit, I was a bit surprised how warm it sometimes must get there, based on that photo.
The window search this week was a true adventure. (And it represented us Southern Hemisphere types — though I’m on the other side of the planet, in Sydney). You’ll get plenty of stories and deep dives on the local flora and fauna, which I look forward to reading all about. It’s quite incredible that a contest about a simple window has become a weekly travelogue, movie review, cocktail and cooking show, biology lesson and much more besides. No doubt it takes a lot of effort, but of all the emails I get each week, the VFYW is the one I (and many others I’m sure) look forward to most. So thank you!
The vast majority of the thanks goes to all the obsessive sleuths and their incredible finds. Subscribe here to get the full results each week, if you’re not already a paid Dish member. Join the obsession!
A married couple determines the right country in this week’s view:
We have pretty antiquated gender divisions in my house (or is it actual brain chemistry?). It’s not our fault; we’re Boomers! For the view this week, I sat for a while looking for people (none) and visual cultural clues. I was halfway finished with my cocktail while searching for rodeo rings in the Rockies when my husband opened his computer.
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