(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.)
Wow, that’s actually unbelievable! I’m so excited! Although, I have to admit, I’m slightly disappointed that I still guessed one window away. How frustrating ... two weeks in a row. I’ll have to work on that.
As for the prize, I would love the VFYW book and continue to support the Dish. I’m very eager to read through it, and it seems like such a unique gift! Again, thanks so much, and look out for future entries!
Yes please! I love how nearly every winner sticks with the contest. From the submitter of last week’s view:
It was great to see my photo featured in the contest. And the depth and breadth of Dishheads’ knowledge of the places we explore every week is always impressive!
Totes. Our super-sleuth on the UWS announces, “Last week’s write-up on Casablanca so inspired my husband and I that we’ve decided to visit Morocco later this year”:
We’ve discussed it before, but never made any further effort. Now we know we’re going, and have started to check out hotels and flights.
That trip will give us an opportunity to pop across the Straits to see Gibraltar again. My last name sounds Italian, but actually it goes back many generations in Gibraltar. Once you get to the early 1700s, it moves over to Portugal. My husband (who is Jewish) is convinced that I have some connection to Jews who had to flee Spain during the Inquisition. He theorizes that I might be Jewish. This is highly unlikely given that a) this is all on my Dad’s side, while b) Jewish identity is matrilineal; and c) my Mom was seriously Irish. Let’s face it: I’m a goy.
Another followup — an even more excellent one — comes from our super-sleuth in Fort Collins:
Thanks for another wonderful contest! As usual, all the various stories, recipes, and history lessons were fantastic.
One little tidbit that stood out in the Casablanca write-up was the reference to Josephine Baker and her work as a spy during WW2. I have to confess I knew very little about Baker until a few years ago. One of my daughters lives in a Paris suburb called Le Vesinet, and her apartment is a 10-minute walk from Baker’s villa, Beau-Chêne. Following Baker’s induction into the Panthéon in 2021, my daughter has spearheaded a drive to have a statue dedicated to Baker outside her villa. Details on the effort can be found at the commemorative website.
On to Casablanca, Chile.
My wife and I spent a few wonderful weeks in Chile in December, and the photo below is from the Kingston family winery in Casablanca. For any of the sleuths who are thinking about a trip to Chile, they should add this winery to the list of must-visits:
Our super-sleuth in Raleigh:
Well, I didn’t get to submit an entry last week and it is just as well. Like another sleuth, I found my way to the Miraflores district of Lima, Peru, with its ubiquitous clay tennis courts. No wonder I could not find the right hotel, as it was half a hemisphere away. Oh well, you win some and you lose some …
Our married team in Falcon Heights writes, “You asked for more view submissions; we answered”:
Two of them, taken with shaking hands and head colds. First one:
But looking at the “we took it from here,” I’d say we’d have to take another one:
Both views are from the bus shelter on Larpenteur at Snelling:
Hope they made you laugh!
Chuckles indeed ensued. One more pre-game entry comes from the VFYW chef, who appreciates “the wonderful community of sleuth-poets you have gathered”:
Every week in the contest, I look forward to the biology lesson and the dissertation on architecture. I peruse the movies, songs, and eco tours for inspiration. I love the history, the fun facts, the famous people, the hot springs, ski slopes, murals, street art, and bookstores. The meticulous reasoning of Giuseppe and the stark genius of Chini. The VFYW Reimagined. I miss the Austin mixologist but appreciate the new Park Avenue cocktail guy. Custom postcards and short stories have come and gone. What memories.
On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Alexandria starts us off:
Happy Super Bowl! Go WhoEver! I don’t care about the teams ... which is great :) Our neighborhood gets together for a big potluck which is really fun. We’ll be rooting for commercials and Bad Bunny.
I am throwing a long wobbly pass on this contest guess: Franklin, TN? I like the foggy mountains in the background. I couldn’t read the highway signs ... ugh. The view has a Spectrum store near an interstate and blue license plates with a requirement for trailers to have a plate on the back ... but that’s all I’ve got.
I look forward to seeing where this gas station is located. Thanks again for another great write-up, I’m sure, to come,
Our super-sleuth in DC writes, “This is probably the most depressing view I’ve seen in the VFYW contest — mainly because of the gloomy weather on the day the photo was taken, not because [city redacted] is inherently unattractive.” Chini has a brighter view:
Our super-sleuth in Japan names the right country:
Absolutely NO luck with this week’s photo ... so I will be in high admiration of those who get it.
Driving on the right and the price of petrol (gas?!) are the only things I can hold onto to estimate “somewhere in the USA.” I tried googling Spectrum and Jersey Mike’s, but neither of them are area-specific enough to make an educated guess Jersey Mike’s boast of 3,271 locations in the USA and a further 297 coming soon:
From our super-sleuth in Rome:
Here we go again with a view where the main clue is a store chain, as in contests #482 (EōS Fitness) and #489 (Caterpillar). My heartfelt thanks go to the webmaster of the Jersey Mike’s Subs’ website who provided a map for each store.
Here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Berkeley:
This is a dreary, damp, and overcast place somewhere in the US (although I suppose it could be Canada). How desolate does a place have to be for a Shell station to be the cheeriest thing in sight? A gas station and a KFC, plus a couple of strip-mall signs to provide a bit of ambient light. Pan to the right or left and I assume we’d see the Lidless Eye of Sauron staring into our souls.
At first this contest looked as hard to solve as any of the difficult-but-not-insoluble views we’ve had, what with there being nothing but a handful of chain businesses to investigate (and there are just too many KFCs and Shell stations in the country to go down that rabbit hole). For a minute I had hope for Jersey Mike’s Subs, never having heard of the place. I briefly hoped it would turn out to be a small regional chain instead of the nationwide company I subsequently learned it is. Their website claims they have 3,271 outlets dotting the landscape from sea to shining sea. (Does anyone know if they’re any good? I was surprised to learn there’s one within 15 minutes of my house in a shopping center I’ve never visited.)
That’s when I realized the solution wasn’t going to fall into my lap and it was time to engage the brain, and surprisingly it’s right after that when things started falling into place.
Our super-sleuth in West Orange guesses his own state:
This feels like a view that requires brute force (where do the pictured stores overlap?), and unfortunately I ran out of time. My kingdom for a raw text file of Spectrum, Jersey Mike’s, KFC, and Shell locations!
But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s New Jersey! I even asked my wife if it looked like our home state. (She responded “unfortunately yes.”) It almost reminds me of Whippany, East Hanover, or one of those other townships with a ton of strip centers. Not like our lovely West Orange, with its mere tasteful smattering of strip centers.
This next sleuth also sees New Jersey — but a fictional one:
East Soprano, NJ?
Woke up this morning, all that love had gone. Lord above, things ain’t been the same since the blues walked into town ...
Another sleuth has a super-short entry: “Scranton, PA, USA.” Here again is the Japan sleuth, who gets to the right coast:
Since it’s raining in the view (more my scene than Albuquerque!), I want to say West Coast — but it rains some of the time in most places!
From our previous winner in Sherman Oaks:
This week’s contest was done pretty quickly. From the gray sky and wet pavement I guessed Norcal, Pacific Northwest, maybe even British Columbia. I tried searching for Shell Gas Stations with green vertical stripes, but that just took me down to the early history or gas stations where Shell marketed a special high octane gas called “Green Streak” from 1929-1952. The feeling was the green logos would stand out against the Shell’s red and yellow colors.
But no mention anywhere of a Shell gas station in a gray building with green vertical stripes.
From the Brookline super-sleuth:
This week’s contest was all about winnowing. When it came to crosschecking store locations, I assumed that the Jersey Mike’s x Spectrum combination would be less of a grind than KFC x Shell, but I still needed to limit the geographical scope. Based on the green sign in the background, I focused on states with black-and-white highway markers that are round or round-ish in shape.
Of the five states with purely circular designs, Kentucky and New Jersey seemed promising, but no matches there. I moved on to the rounded shield design of [state redacted], which proved to have manageable numbers of Jersey Mike’s and Spectrum locations to browse via Google Street View.
Our Reimagined magician in San Mateo names the right region:
Given that this contest was solved because of the overlap of KFC, Jersey Mike’s, Spectrum, and Shell gas stations, here’s the Reimagined emphasizing that overlap and adding a Pacific Northwest vibe:
He also suggests a sub-challenge to the contest:
Not that you need any extra work, but you might consider adding a new element to the contest: who is the FIRST sleuth to identify the building from which the VFYW was taken — not the window, just the building.
Sure, let’s give it a shot.
From our Burner super-sleuth in Seattle:
A generic industrial/retail window with a Shell, KFC, Jersey Mike’s and Spectrum. How hard can it be?! Very, as it turns out.
As I was giving up, I saw the price of gas but didn’t really think anything of it since I’m accustomed to expensive gas. That’s when i realized it had to be Washington, Oregon or California (certainly not Hawaii — the other expensive gas state). I’m in between snowboarding trips, so I had time to get to the bottom of this.
He did indeed — as did our super-sleuth in Bend, who reveals the right state (his own):
Those license plates are very smudged, but the green smears in the middle of light-colored plates made me immediately think of Oregon and its standard Doug fir plate:
Our previous winner in South Jersey also has a savvy solution:
When I first saw this, I thought it would be practically impossible, since Jersey Mike’s, Spectrum, KFC, and Shell are everywhere. I imagined massive spreadsheets of overlapping locations, searching for locational vertices late into the night like something out of A Beautiful Mind.
My first thought was to try to find the (seemingly unusual) gray-and-green building; Google was exactly zero help here. But then I had a wild idea: where is gas $3.93 a gallon? I know this could have been taken anytime, but I had nothing to lose. And according to Google, weirdly, not that many places have gas in that price range recently. The very first place they mentioned was Oregon, and since the picture has gray skies, mountains, and a little snow, I figured, what the hell?
So then I Google Mapped Jersey Mike’s locations, followed by Spectrum locations. There were a handful of overlaps, and I lucked out when I went to street view for the very first one. I was shocked!
From our super-sleuth in Vancouver, WA:
I have been in [city redacted] a number of times, and it was rather unremarkable to me, although it is quite near some interesting places for outdoor activities around the Rogue River, as well as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in nearby Ashford. When the weather is nice, it’s a beautiful area. I’m sure your sleuths will have some interesting stories to tell!
A previous victor writes, “Greetings from the UK”:
I think this picture is from the SpringHill Suites by Marriott Portland Hillsboro, located at 7351 NE Butler St in Hillsboro, Oregon. The likely window is shown with an X:
X doesn’t mark the spot this time. Our previous winner in Roberts Creek names the right city:
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