VFYW: Hello Dolly!

For contest #350, we drop into the land of drizzle — and damaged thumbs.

(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.)

The submitter of last week’s photo learned something spooky about his own town:

Thanks for the wonderful VFYW post from your wonderful sleuths. My partner and I loved every bit of it. It was fun reading about where people thought this place was located. A few postscripts:  

• I forgot about Dr. Fortier. I actually knew his ex-wife Louise “Rusty” Fortier before she died.

• We stayed at the Overland a few times before we bought our house. I forgot it is allegedly haunted. The story goes that a previous owner was shot and killed on site and the killer robbed him, so he haunts the place … but we never saw anything out of the ordinary.  

• I’m not surprised some people thought the photo was taken at the Mother Lode Motel, since it’s directly below our house.  

This was fun, thanks again.

Another followup comes from our globetrotting sleuth in Alaska:

Nice write-up as always. I appreciated your stellar evaluation of Valley of Fire State Park. There are other parks that deserve similar kudos, but I love Valley of Fire too, and I try to get there every time someone makes me go through Vegas.

I can only stand Vegas for about 24 hours. And speaking of Valley of Fire, I captured a view from my Airstream window there to use for the contest some day; and on a separate visit, my photographer ex-girlfriend had a shoot up in the red craggy hills, with an adult film star who came over from Vegas:

One more sleuth from last week:

That was the third week in a row with a tall slender object as part of the view — crematorium stack, smelter smokestack and now church spire. Hmmm. Are all your view choices giving us the finger?

A thumb’s up! On to this week’s view, here’s the super-champ in Austin:

You’re going to frustrate a lot of people with this one. Low-resolution image, generic countryside that feels like someplace in the UK — so it could be England, Scotland, Wales, or even Ireland. Row houses, a manicured park, and a church steeple. Grassy hills. Not a lot to go on.

The three-daughtered dad spots a black cat:

No time this week, but I found a fun building in Riga, Latvia that has the right color and pitch to its conical roof, plus dormer windows — but not like the unusual ones in the VFYW:

And, had this been the VFYW photo, you would’ve had to put the Dish dog on that cat!

I also found this church in Kuldiga, which is a pretty good fit architecturally to the one in the distance, although the color is wrong:

So on the strength of those two clues, I’m going with Latvia.

From a regular sleuth:

Sorry I skipped last week, but I only had two days at home between the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival and the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair. I would have guessed Wyoming rather than Nevada. I had no idea the chimney had anything to do with ore, so I wouldn’t have gotten far with a search.

For this week, I have a dart-at-the-map guess. At first I thought Arles, France, since the view reminded me of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but Arles has red roofs, not gray roofs.  :-/

Not sure what to make of this. The image is not high-definition — at least, not on my computer. I can’t even tell if the church spire is square or hexagonal; or whether the base of the spire has windows or is open all the way through. On the left side of the image on the hill, is that a water tower or an observatory?

Several times the better sleuths have mentioned details I just don’t see. (The blue flag last week was one of those.) My computer is 12 years old. Do I need to upgrade my computer to play this contest?

It’s a fairly low-rez photo. Chini has a sharper one:

Recognize it yet? Another sleuth goes with “not Bern, Switzerland”:

We’re hosting our neighbor (who grew up in Switzerland) for an evening while the apartment above her is being painted (fumes). This is her response: “Bern is the capital, is surrounded by the river, like a U, and the building codes meant that you could not go above a certain height.” (Someone important supposedly gave an important speech during COVID in that big open space you can see in the picture.)

But 45 minutes later: “never mind, that architecture — that’s French! That’s not Bern.”

Thank you for providing nearly an hour of guest entertainment. If we come upon the correct answer, I will let you know.

Another sleuth is getting Halloween-y vibes:

I think the window is probably somewhere in the UK, like Edinburgh or Londonderry, but my first instinct was Transylvania. I have to say that this illustration from 1697 is a dead ringer for the window view!

From the UWS sleuth from Cali:

I timed out this week. I looked around Ireland for a bit but couldn’t find it. I’ve settled on Wales somewhere. I’m reasonably sure I’m within a few thousand miles of the right answer.

Within 300 miles. Our super-sleuth in Tucson gets the right country: