(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.)
Oh wow, I’m glad I sent my entry! I’ll take the two-year subscription — thank you so much!
Here’s a followup for last week:
Damn! My husband and I were there in August, and I recognized Lake Como and the Chiasso Valley in Switzerland behind it, but I didn’t enter the contest because I couldn’t find the rooftops to identify the window. Never thought they might be below the funicular station!
That said, I want to note for the record that not all the cafes in Brunate are as inhospitable as the one mentioned in last week’s write-up. Having taken the funicular to the top, we had absolutely no idea what to do next, so we walked around for awhile and decided to have apero before returning to Como town for dinner. In the back streets, we stumbled upon a place with a clearly local clientele. The nonna running it waved us in, sat us down, recommended the house Prosecco, and served up a full plate of the typical snacks. Seating was right out in the street, and we got to watch multigenerational local families gather to relax at the end of the day. Turned out to be a highlight of our visit to the region:
My husband, Joey, enjoying the Prosecco and snacks
Another followup comes from this previous winner:
I enjoyed the write-up last week, and I really enjoyed eating pizzoccheri della Valtellina when in Bormio years ago, which I almost mentioned in my entry. Despite northern Italy not seeming too geographically large, I feel like every time I mention some regional food to an Italian who I think lives in the region, they say something like, “Oh, that’s not my region — that’s 30km away!” I don’t think I’ll ever be able to calibrate myself to European geographic scale.
I thought I might try the mixologist’s “Ugly Italian” cocktail tonight, but black sambuca appears to be harder to source on short notice than I thought. That one will have to go in the queue!
One more followup comes from CO/NJ:
I was tormented with an earworm for two days after reading last week’s results and the featured song, “Funiculì, Funiculà.” It was the theme to an advertisement from my childhood that was triggered, but I could only recall part of the words and not the critical subject of the ad. After 48 hours of playing it over and over again in my head, it finally came to me: Burger King veal parmigiana!
On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Bend names the right country:
A Cadillac suggests that this is the US or Canada. Some non-US model cars leave us with Canada. Tim Hortons, though also located in many places in the US, is still of course all abooot Canada.
Another gets closer: “The orange-striped traffic cones helped narrow me to Eastern Canada.” Our super-sleuth in Chicagoland runs through more clues:
I usually have a rule for myself regarding the VFYW: if I can’t find the window within an hour, I let it go. This rule is to help me avoid obsessing over the view for the entire weekend. This week’s view, however, had so many clues and contradictions that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. For example, the Tim Hortons suggests Canada, but the presence of sunshine suggests not Canada.
Here are some of the clues I chased after:
The 1980s-era sign for Tim Hortons strongly suggests Canada but does not eliminate the US.
The license plates are North American style. They are also white and on the front of cars, so that eliminates places like Pennsylvania.
The 25+ story apartment building plus the four-lane, one-way street suggests a major urban environment … but the numerous small buildings suggest this is not one of the major urban environments.
The water is blue, which suggests a deep lake or bay, rather than a river. However, there is land on the other side of the water, which suggests this is a smaller lake or bay.
The far side of the water does not appear to be urban, and there are no signs of bridges, so that also suggests the water is not a river.
All the legible signage is in English, so that cuts out Quebec.
The twin pineapple street lanterns are distinctive, but a long search just for these turned up nothing, so this area might not be touristy.
So where does this leave us? I think Benoit Blanc succinctly summarizes the situation:
He eventually got to the right place, unlike this sleuth:
The Tim Hortons sign seems to say Canada. Montreal is just a guess.
Here’s another city from the super-sleuth in Riverlands:
Thanks again for posting my Lake Como photo last week. It was great fun, and I will continue to submit more no doubt. This week stymied me. I know it’s a larger city, but after searching many many Tim Horton locations, I came up short. But I’ll guess Toronto.
So does the previous winner in Vancouver, WA:
Hope you are having a good holiday season, Chris! It feels like I’m really close on this view, but I’m running out of time to nail it down. (On the other hand, maybe I’m in the wrong continent entirely, but I want to make a guess anyway!) I’m guessing we’re in Toronto — first because the all-knowing Google seems pretty sure of it, and also there are many “Always Fresh” Tim Hortons coffeeshops in the area. Even the blurry sign in the window across the street — which seems to read “PCT” — might refer to a girl’s “cheer and tumbling” group that just happens to be based nearby in the Mississauga area.
I couldn’t locate the barbershop across the street, and there are way too many Tim Hortons in the area to search — almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks in Seattle! The neighborhoods along Dundas Street look a lot like the photo in our view, but I’m not ready to commit enough time to narrow this one down, so I’ll submit my humble guess and wait to read about it on Friday night!
Here’s the beginning of the entry from the Seville super-sleuth:
As soon as I saw this week’s view, I knew I could get it relatively quickly. I was just in Toronto in October for a history conference and saw Tim Hortons everywhere, so my first instinct was to search Toronto, especially given the visible body of water in the background. Looking up barbershops at the same time helped narrow the search. (Is that Johnny Depp on the barbershop’s window?)
As my options in Toronto became exhausted, I was pulled south along the coast of Lake Ontario until I finally found the right spot.
The super-sleuth in San Mateo names the barbershop and the other establishments on that block:
I’m from the Bay Area, where brick buildings are relatively scarce due to their lack of earthquake resistance (see the magnitude 7.0 earthquake offshore at Cape Mendocino). So what jumped out at me was the brick building. It’s a world of diverse food, technology, and mind-altering substances in one building: First Barber, “Cell Tec For Less” phone & laptop repair, iklick Internet Lounge, Burrito Bandidos, Sky High Gift Shop, Brow Studio, Tondou Ramen, Meltwich Food Co., Tomah Restaurant “Taste of Syria,” and, last but not least, 420 Love. And then there’s that iconic “Tim Hortons — Always Fresh” sign obtruding into view.
So for this week’s Reimagined, let’s start with that brick-ish building, make it stand out from the background a bit, then remove “The Marketeer” and that distracting building behind it. And finally, for good measure, transport the Tim Hortons sign over to our side of the street onto the roof:
Or maybe we should Reimagine the building in brick red?
San Mateo also crunches some numbers:
As of late 2023, there were over 5,700 Tim Hortons locations worldwide. If it took 30 seconds to check out each one, it would take only 48 hours to go through all of them. The majority of the Tim Hortons are in Canada, with over 3,500 stores, but one can also find Tim Hortons in countries like the United States, Mexico, China, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and several Middle Eastern countries. So even if you picked a random Tim Hortons anywhere in the world, you’d have a 60% chance of getting the right country.
A visual from the DC super-sleuth:
I initially thought that Tim Hortons restaurants were located only in Canada and didn’t realize that there are 1,000+ in other countries, including more than 500 here in the US. Who knew?
The super-champ in Berkeley writes:
Without the Tim Hortons sign sitting there, all Canadian-looking, I’m not sure what I would’ve done. But it seemed reasonable to apply the old diagnostic principle: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” So presumably this wasn’t going to turn out to be one of the 500 Tim Hortons in China, or the 250 or so on the Arabian peninsula, or the 50 in Britain, or the 500+ in the US. More than likely this would turn out to be one of the 4,000+ Tim Hortons that are dotted all over Canada.
A previous winner pleads, “Can we go back to looking for Sinclair gas stations like in contest #442? There were only 1,700 or so of those.” Another writes:
Train-of-thought: Tim Horton = Canada, most likely. Water in background = Vancouver, obviously, where my son’s family lives. Simple.
Ooops, lots of Tims to check out:
Another names the right province:
Ironically, the feature I thought would be totally useless for finding this week’s window — the Tim Hortons — ended up being what helped me track this one down pretty quickly. The view seemed pretty likely to be in the US or Canada; the “do not enter” road signs without any text suggested Canada; the front license plates suggested Ontario, Manitoba, or British Columbia; and the vibes are definitely Ontario. The apartment construction is typical of the growth in southern Ontario in the greater Toronto area, but the skyline suggested some distance from the city.
Chini provides a sweeping view of the skyline:
From a previous winner in Plano:
The obvious starting clue is the Tim Hortons sign, which strongly suggests Canada. (Having said that, Timmy’s has opened stores as far away as Texas.) Plus, the angle of the sun, and the satellite dish placement across the street, imply a northern latitude. The sunlight and shadows indicate a view looking north.
The next major clue is the narrow body of water to the north:
Thinking about a narrow body of water north of an older part of a Canadian town, my initial thoughts were Halifax and Vancouver. (I was all fired up to write an essay about the devastating explosion in Halifax in 1917 — a fascinating story I know a little about and wouldn’t mind exploring more.) It wasn’t too time-consuming to look at each Tim Hortons in older neighborhoods of Halifax and Vancouver, but neither city has a Tim Hortons location that works.
So ... back to the view for another clue. What about that bus?
Brookline takes the bus to the right city:
Clue #1 was the tail end of the bus visible through the curtain on the left. The combination of yellow-and-dark stripes reminded me of the color scheme of our beloved MBTA buses here in the Boston area ... but the pattern of the stripes is slightly different:
Route 86 MBTA bus — the route on which I commuted to work for seven years!
I searched Google for other city buses with yellow stripes and happened upon the yellow/gold-and-blue paint scheme of …
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