(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.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
A country with more native tongues than any other
The largest butterfly on Earth and the world’s only poisonous bird
Mesmerizing mollusks
A library that floats around the ocean
A proximity guess wins the prize this week — 8,100 miles from the window, which might the the farthest in VFYW history.
Yay! Thanks for selecting my entry. The book would be great.
Here’s the runner-up from that contest:
Noooooooo!
Ah well, I’ll just try to get it before another 16 years goes by? For now I’ll stick to sharing my own windows — like from yesterday’s Good Friday ice storm here in Iron Mountain, MI:
And thank you for publishing Dick’s story last week; he will be so pleased!
Hi to Dick! Here’s a longtime local of the latest city:
Thanks for the encyclopedic riffs on Denver in contest #502 — even if some of the more obvious large public artworks to rival “The Big Sweep” (giant broom and dustpan at the Denver Art Museum) were MIA, notably “Big Blue Bear,” which peeks benignly through the tall windows of the Colorado Convention Center downtown:
Not to mention what we call the “dancing aliens” boogying nearby outside the Denver Performing Arts Complex:
Any passing mention of Wynkoop Brewing Co. (for its the Heisman-posing simian) that fails to note its distinction as Colorado’s first brewpub is kinda flat and skunky — which is not how Wynkoop’s signature Rail Yard Ale tastes. And, oh yeah: the brewery was founded back in the 1980s by a laid-off mining geologist named John Hickenlooper (aka Hick, or to a few, J-Loop). Hick went on to become Denver’s mayor and is now one of our two US senators. Although he no longer owns the place, Wynkoop’s remains an original anchor of the revitalization of Denver’s old skid-row quarter in Lower Downtown. (And yes, we’ve called it LoDo ever since.)
Finally, a small correction to your “local animal report”: Nee Noshe Reservoir — where that bald eagle sent all those thousands of Snow Geese into the sky — is NOT “about an hour south of Denver,” unless you’re traveling by plane. (Good luck finding a place to land!) We Coloradans who enjoy the state’s uncommonly abundant birdlife (for an interior state with no coastline) know that Nee Noshe and its companion reservoirs north of the Arkansas River Valley in southeastern Colorado are THREE hours south of Denver, give or take five minutes. So if you’re a birder and want to enjoy spring migration (now through the end of May) in that very “birdy” corner of the state, plan travel times accordingly.
Despite picking nits, I remain a fervent fan of the VFYW. Thanks for enlivening our Fridays, and thanks for the fine shoutout to the Queen City of the Plains (before Mile High City became the slogan) and the Centennial State (Colorado’s 150th anniversary of statehood is August 1).
Another beer-related followup — plus a small clue for this week’s view — comes from our CO/NJ super-sleuth:
I hope you had a happy Easter and a relaxing week off work. I really enjoyed the sleuths’ stories about my childhood home city of Denver, and I even learned many things. Of the things I did know, the Ft. Collins super-sleuth’s recommendation of the Westbound and Down brewery was spot on. We frequent the original Idaho Springs location, usually hitting it on our drive back to Summit County after a trip from Denver or the airport. They produce consistently great beer. In fact, as I am typing this, I am drinking one of their products:
Serendipitously, this particular beer — a New Zealand IPA from a Colorado brewery — serves as a link between last week’s contest and this one, since this week we are rather close to New Zealand (maybe not in absolute distance, but certainly in geographic regionality).
Yet another followup comes from our super-sleuth in Indy (who crafts the weekly report on a local band):
I wanted to comment on Eagle Rock’s memory of Denver and his interesting story about the Dandy Warhols. I mentioned the band in a 2023 contest (Hong Kong) and their ongoing feud with Brian Jonestown Massacre. There’s a documentary about it called Dig!, and you will see the crazy in both bands:
I’m sure that experiencing a band in the way Eagle Rock did can certainly change your opinion. That’s why I don’t always like to go too deeply into some musicians. It’s better just to listen to their music. (FWIW, I like the Dandy Warhols.)
Next up, our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Oklahoma City has a “quick reaction to Sagaponack’s mural from the latest contest”:
Its graceful curves framed the scenes and gave them order, just like the parapet at the rooftop terrace of the Denver Art Museum gathered the sky and city into a single cradle, all in Libeskind’s style:
A photo I took on 3/17/26
And the many distant views of the Rockies in the contest reminded me of the Front Range, seen from a roadside pullout on Route 67 near Cripple Creek, looking westward in a November morning of 2024:
I like the long, serrated procession of the snowy peaks, not entirely regular, but laid one next to another as if by a confident, rhythmic hand. Say, the right hand of Bob Ross. I can imagine him saying, “You need the dark in order to show the light.” Or “It’s so important to do something every day that will make you happy.”
I am not sure about every day, but doing the VFYW puzzle every Saturday does make me happy. Thanks Chris!
Thanks goes to the sleuths! Here’s the super one in Augusta:
Summer Greetings! (No spring here in the South — straight to summer for us!) Apologies to those who never want to see snow ever again, but I’m already counting down to next winter. Hope you had a restful break (and that things are going better for you).
Even with the extra week, I haven’t been able to find any time for sleuthing, but I was delighted to open the most recent View and see all the mentions of the Denver International Airport, since it has got to be the most random place on earth to ever have so many conspiracy theories surrounding it. Places like Stonehenge or Area 51, sure — but a public airport?
I first encountered the DIA lore in this 2011 Anderson Cooper segment featuring the “Third Eagle of the Apocalypse” and his groundbreaking investigation into the secret agenda of ... uh, Big Phallus?
The “Co-Prophet of the End Times” noticed Mr. Cooper noticing him, which then led to this video, as well as this one. Let’s hope no one ever tells this guy about Bhutan!
Also, I can’t believe the VFYW landed in Colorado without anyone trying to blatantly pander to you by referencing South Park. So to remedy that, may I present Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a 2023 casual lifestyle sim (think Animal Crossing, but with Sanrio’s classic characters) by Boulder-based developers Sunblink Entertainment — which induced a strong sense of déjà vu in all those who recalled the classic 2006 episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft”:
No such game existed, but since it was so immediately evocative of a particular genre of game, it quickly became a meme that was acknowledged by Sanrio itself (although upon the actual game’s release, the company was very quick to emphasize that it was completely unaffiliated with South Park and contained no crossover content whatsoever). I’m sure Butters pre-ordered it twice!
Butters always brightens my day. Here’s belated commemoration of contest #500 from our Alaskan globetrotter (who crafts an ecotourism report every week):
If I were to reflect on 500+ weeks of the VFYW, I’d say its greatest pleasures are the opportunities to learn esoterica about an astonishing diversity of places. When I occasionally divulge that my major in college was human geography, I recognize that people probably think I can recite capitals — but I no longer try to explain my interest in “where” with an academic spiel. I just tell them about the contest. Each week it holds my interest as I try to suss out the clues that make a place distinct and the window findable; researching an adventure one might take if you got dropped there; and most of all, getting exposure to the vast array of odd facts, stories, and associations that others bring in the Reveal. Truly a geographer’s playground.
On to this week’s view, here’s the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Brookland:
Surveying the photo, the first thing that struck me were the red satellite dishes: surely, this must get us at least to the right country! Alas, red satellite dishes are much more common worldwide than I would have guessed.
I really wish I was better at tree identification, but at the very least, I can say that palm trees mean somewhere tropical. And judging by the terrain here, it has to be somewhere mountainous as well.
A sleuth in La Jolla seizes upon a big clue:
Feels like tropical Latin America. At first I thought Rio de Janeiro, but “PLAZA” is Spanish, not Portuguese. Medellin, Colombia? Backup guess is San Jose, Costa Rica, but really this could be one of dozens of hilly cities in South America.
Our super-sleuth in Austin also focused on the sign:
Good contest this week. The big clue was the “PLAZA” signage visible on the condo tower. I recognized the font as the same from the hotel chain CROWNE PLAZA. Knowing we were in a hilly, tropical area — and likely near the ocean, given the balconies on the other buildings all facing the same direction — I was able to locate the CROWNE PLAZA residences in [city redacted] after only a bit of searching.
He’s right about the ocean, as Chini reveals here:
From a previous winner in London:
Not a picture (I think ) of somewhere in the USA (hurrah!) — which opens the field to those, such as me, who live elsewhere. My initial thoughts were the south of France, where I had many fabulous holidays as a youth). Then I realised the vegetation was too lush, so I thought of St Lucia — again a great holiday — although I was nearly booted out on arrival, as our travel agent took our money six months earlier but conveniently forgot to pass it on. The agent and I had a full and frank conversation that night.
But I eventually I settled on Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago, specifically the Cascade area. A lot of topography clues. Opting for a hotel, I think I have narrowed it to the Hilton Trinidad Conference centre. The possible window is marked with an X:
Little I can input on the country, except I know that it qualified for the 2006 football World Cup (soccer, to those in the USA). It was then the smallest nation (both in size and population) to qualify.
A sleuth in Toronto is also looking in the Caribbean:
Time is short this week, so I’m just going to throw this out there: Castries, St. Lucia, only because I’ve been there a few times and this looks very familiar.
From a first-time sleuth:
I saw the latest view and here’s my guess: Istanbul, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. It could be Acibadem or else Bugurlu — which is not a name to pronounce during a meal.
Heh. The Intrepid Couch Traveler throws a dart:
So after extensive research, focused mainly on the color of the satellite dishes, I have narrowed our location down tremendously. I have determined it is coming from only one of the seven continents. It only took me half an hour to eliminate Antarctica as a possibility. The rest took longer.
But it appears the dishes are from Claro TV. And thank God they are not a global company — merely a continental one, across large parts of South America.
But then, despite two weeks to solve this one, I somehow ran out of time. So, time for the patented Intrepid Couch Traveler dart, which landed on São Paulo, Brazil:
Our super-sleuth in Riverwoods has a WAG for Matagalpa, Nicaragua:
This was a tough one for me and I am out of time. I got as far as the red satellite dishes likely being from the satellite provider Claro. The problem is they operate in 18 Latin American countries — too many to search easily. And neither the Plaza sign nor the colorful water collection arrangement on the roof helped me either. So I threw in the towel this week.
Our super-sleuth in Alexandria gets to the right region:
I’m guessing this window is somewhere in Ipoh, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. I have zero proof, except that I want it to be that place :) The buildings and vegetation kind of look like it, but it’s a stretch.
My husband and I spent a fun and memorable week there in 1990: spectacular birding, hiking, drinking tea, enjoying the cool temperatures, and not enjoying the terrifying bus rides. It was great! We then hopped an overnight train in Kuala Lumpur and got off at Singapore for a few days ... then on to Bali.
So fun to be in your 20s with no schedule, no job, no reservations, and nowhere to be … no money, too, but that also was pretty fun. Thanks for the memories!
Thanks for sharing! Our super-sleuth on the UWS names the right country and city:
Hope you had a restorative week off! I’m here at the last minute (again) with little to show for it (again). Too many things going on: that’s my sad excuse!
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