(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.)
I’ll take the free two-year subscription. Thanks for running a fun contest!
This sleuth was having fun elsewhere:
Oof, last week was a missed opportunity! I had the joyful distraction of a visit by my two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, so I didn’t participate in VFYW. I glanced at the picture, thought a little about it being Mediterranean, but didn’t go back to it.
I should have! Sheesh, my wife took a picture of me with that mountain peak in the background while exploring the Greek and Roman ruins:
We went the week after France began allowing vaccinated Americans to enter the country. (This was also our first trip from our newly purchased travel base in Nashua that I mentioned a few weeks ago — the beginning of lots of trips.) We had Provence to ourselves and it was stunning!
That was the good news. The bad/sad news was we originally planned to be in Edinburgh for our daughter’s graduation after four years of hard work, but Scotland was a late holdout and still had a 10-day hotel quarantine, which made it impossible. Luckily, Aer Lingus had Paris flights available, so they switched us with no change fee. Lemons, lemonade, etc.
Here we are in the Dublin airport, switching flights in the early morning — masked, but it felt good to be free to enter Europe again!
Another followup comes from the super-sleuth on Park Avenue:
I’m quietly pleased with myself for getting the right house last week. As with the super-sleuth in DC, it took me ages to match up the roof profiles, to work back to the house. It was a fun write-up — thanks! — and tonight we are going to make the Sidecar du Sud, since a Sidecar is one of my favorite cocktails!
The sleuth who submitted last week’s view addresses the super-sleuth in San Fran:
As for the wine, we did not get to Trévallon, but we did spend an entire day in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, with an extended tour of Domaine Bois de Boursan with the winemaker, Jean-Paul Versino, and had a private lunch at the Les Caves St-Charles, where a Tardieu-Laurent Rogue and a Grand Tinel Blanc were the two wines of the day. Here’s most of the wine we had at the villa during the week (there were seven, sometimes nine of us for dinner):
From a previous winner “way out west”:
Great stories last week! I loved the Van Gogh Pokeman tie-in, as well as Van Gogh’s messy room cleaned up before “Mummy” arrives. And I agree with you regarding the Dr. Who scene. My wife first showed it to me last year, and it brought tears to my eyes. Thanks again for mentioning it.
Yet another followup:
I have to confess that I did not spend much time exploring the area around this week’s location, as I spent time going back to last week’s contest exploring the area around Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. I’ll be in France with my wife in July and August, and I think we should visit that area. She is a middle-school art teacher (who is retiring tomorrow), so a visit to the Van Gogh-related museums in Provence would be fantastic.
Happy retirement! Another artistic followup comes from “your average super-sleuth in NYC”:
After Renoir in the Chatou contest, Van Gogh in the Saint-Remy contest, and Monet at Giverny in last week’s contest as well, I noticed you snuck in a view from Moorea in the main Dish. That island is less than 20 miles from Papeete, which is where Gauguin painted. Here’s his painting Nafea faa ipoipo? (“When Will You Marry?”), the fourth most expensive painting ever sold, at $210M:
Now we just need a view from Cezanne’s Aix-en-Provence.
On to this week’s view, a previous winner in Canada writes:
Well, we’re getting ready to celebrate our colonially established Victoria Day and the long weekend up here, so I’m getting anxious to be done with the workday. What better way to kick off the holiday weekend than to invest some time in hunting down The Window.
Another thinks it’s located at the “Huntsville Alabama Elements Laboratory.” The super-sleuth in Albany observes:
We are across the parking lot from “CGI,” clearly. I’ve never heard of them, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find the location, right? Ok maybe not. Their website says they have over 90,000 consultants and other professionals across the globe, in 400 locations worldwide.
Another sleuth winnows that list:
The CGI sign on the adjacent office park was an obvious clue, but CGI (an IT consultancy) has hundreds of locations worldwide. How to narrow it down?
First, this is obviously North America from the architecture, street design and license-plate shapes. That still leaves more than 60 locations in the United States to go through, but we are also looking for one in a low-rise suburban, pancake-flat region that has lush but not overtly tropical vegetation. No mountains (so not California, Colorado, etc), no palm trees (not Florida) and no skyline (not New York, Chicago, etc).
A newcomer narrows it down further:
This was my first time trying one of these, so perhaps it was easier than most, or maybe I had rookie luck:
It’s obviously the US or Canada, given the parking and street layout.
It has to be eastern-ish, because of the trees and greenery.
CGI is labelled pretty clearly on the office park building, and their website lists a finite number of office locations.
Not too finite, though, because I had to run through 42 possibilities into Google Maps before finding the location.
In Google street view, it’s not obvious why the beagle is necessary, so I’m curious about that.
More on the beagle soon. The super-champ in Berkeley narrows it down to three states:
Fortunately only about half of CGI’s listed office addresses in the US are located in the Virginia-to-Central-Texas-via-Florida region, so the task turned out to be less daunting than it had threatened to be. Focusing on just the offices in the southeastern coastal states and searching those in list order resulted in my only having to check out the five addresses in Alabama, the singleton in Georgia, and the pair in Louisiana.
Chini knows which one:
Another squints, “The remnants of STOP painted on the surface of the parking lot narrowed it to North America — along with the cellular towers and the American-model SUV captured travelling on the street mid-photo.” Another sleuth picks the right state:
Hello! It’s been a while, but I saw this one come in and thought I’d give it a go. Immediately, as a Southerner, it’s giving “the South” vibes: the street, the architecture, the flora, and the vehicle. So, I figure I’ll start in the American South, because go where you’re comfortable, right?
The layout looks like a university or medical complex. Of course, there’s also that interesting glass structure across the way. There’s no way on God’s green earth that that’s not referred to as “the egg,” right? So, I started googling “[Southern state] the egg university.” I skipped Alabama, because as a proud alum of a school with 18 national championship wins, I know that it’s not there. So I started with lesser Alabama, also known as Mississippi. Nothing. Louisiana? Voila.
Also, Roll Tide!
Another sleuth identifies the odd structure:
The hidden “egg” is the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. My first thought was a smaller college campus in Vermont, but no blue eggs in Vermont.
The super-sleuth in Ridgewood writes, “Well, this one wasn’t too difficult. I googled egg building campus, and it was the ninth result”:
Another writes, “Shouldn’t the beagle have been hiding the CGI logo on the neighboring building, not the egg?!?” From the Providence super-sleuth:
WTF Chris, did you overlook the CGI logo on the wall? I see Dusty is covering something on that dome structure, but there is nothing there when I look at it in Google Earth. Did you place Dusty over the CGI, and then she wandered off when you weren’t looking?
Haha, nah, I was just trying to make an easier contest, since we’ve had some tough ones lately. From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
The egg inspired me to turn it into an item of intimate apparel for this week’s VFYW Reimagined:
A related LOL comes from the newly minted super-sleuth in Chicagoland, who was also confused as to why I covered the egg instead of “CGI”:
I suspect there was a Dusty malfunction:
The CGI building made this a straightforward lookup on the CGI locations page. You may even top a hundred correct guesses this week. Have fun curating that!
Nearly 100 emails came in this week, but fortunately their contents were more concise than usual, so they was easier to curate. A sleuth in Roseville, MN names the right city in Louisiana:
The view looks like a campus of some sort, perhaps with the “I” in CGI meaning “Institute,” so I googled “CGI institute” and fairly quickly found the CGI website with their logo matching the sign in the photo. The infrastructure and vegetation (roadway, lighting, concrete vs. asphalt, a cypress-appearing tree) told me this is somewhere in the eastern US, likely farther south than north.
To determine which of CGI’s many facilities this is, I noticed another clue: the many communications towers in the background. My job is cell-phone tower development — primarily leasing, zoning, and permitting.
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