(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.)
That’s awesome! No doubt I’ll enjoy the VFYW book. Thank you!
From the super-sleuth in Vancouver, BC on her new super status:
Thank you Chris! This would have been unimaginable to me a couple of years ago!
Another followup comes from the CO/NJ biographer:
Thanks again for using my window last week. It generated some publicity. Allow me to explain.
This past Saturday, I had actually returned to Glens Falls to watch my daughter race again at West Mountain, and I stayed again at the Queensbury Hotel. My wife was working this weekend, so I was traveling solo and ate dinner Saturday night by myself at [farmacy] Restobar — the place I mentioned in my write-up. While I ate at the kitchen bar, I was reading the contest results on my phone. Chatting with my server, who is from Glens Falls, I asked her if she recognized the view. Of course, she did immediately. I explained the contest to her and she immediately Googled it, then proceeded to show all her colleagues. I hope you and Andrew get a new subscriber or two!
One more note of interest, to add to Bethlum’s art discussion. While walking back to my hotel from the restaurant, which is only a block away, I noticed a historical marker commemorating the artist Weber Furlong:
Wilhelmina Weber Furlong (1878-1962) was a German-American artist and teacher. Among America’s earliest avant-garde elite modernist painters, she was a major artist who pioneered modern impressionistic still-life painting at the turn of the 20th century. Some of her work is on display at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls.
Here’s a nice note from a previous winner:
Belated happy anniversary wishes! Hope your celebratory ski trip to Maine provided a nice reprieve from sorting through dissents and VFYW submissions.
Indeed! Rae conveys the reprieve:
From the super-sleuth in Nashua:
I hope you enjoyed Sunday River. We’re finally getting more snow in New England, so the skiing is improving. When my kids were young, we took several school vacation weeks there, and I enjoy the skiing. New Hampshire is always a week after Mass, so it’s usually the last week of February and pretty cold.
On one memorable trip, we had a good dump of snow and had fun skiing all day in the quiet while it came down. Then, the next day — as is typical for a Nor'easter — the backside of the storm turned cold and windy — really windy. We were all pretty cold by midday and decided to head back to the base hotel. My youngest, who was 7 at the time, was unable to get down the hill because a headwind was howling straight up the fall line and she literally couldn’t ski down! I had to hunch over behind her and push her down the hill in front of me. When we got to the bottom, we spent the rest of the day in the heated pool.
A heated hot tub was waiting at our Airbnb after each ski day, thank God. One of the friends we stayed with, a meteorologist in the Air Force, actually taught me what our sleuth just conveyed: that gusty winds usually arrive the day after a big snowfall. Thankfully we had two days of fresh powder — uncommon for East Coast skiing.
Here’s a new VFYW junkie:
No more apologies for spending time on the VFYW — it’s time well spent. It’s a bit like Don Draper and the Carousel; the exercise is a mystery tour and a memory path. In this case, one of the best.
Speaking of the memory path, two weeks ago in the Budapest contest, the sleuth who submitted the window view — the super one in Eagle Rock — recalled a memory of Budapest from 1994:
A Hungarian guy named Mádar, who played drums in Jack’s skronky math-rock band, Ribspreader, shadowed me the whole evening like I owed him money. He didn’t speak English, so I couldn’t confront him. The next day I asked Jack what was up with Mádar. Answer: because Hungary so recently emerged from the Iron Curtain, Western luxuries were scarce and American pop culture artifacts were hard to get. Mádar had been eyeballing my Rollins Band t-shirt, hoping I’d get drunk and pass out so he could gank it. Had I known, I would have given the shirt to him.
So this time around, I brought a replica with me. I know the record store where Mádar works, so we’ll see how this goes.
This week he writes, “It only took 30 years, but Mádar got his shirt”:
A previous winner writes:
From time to time you air opposing opinions about the length and content of the VFYW entries. For the record, I endorse the length and content. The thing that makes VFYW the greatest internet-puzzle challenge is that it grew organically from reader contributions of ideas and pictures. I celebrate the creative output it inspires, even if I don’t always have time to read all of it.
Myself, I have won the contest, and although I only occasionally enter, I nearly always play. I’ve found that submitting wild guesses isn’t satisfying for me. I’ll further say that hope for the return of VFYW was one of the primary motivations for me to pay attention to Andrew in the dark ages between the blog and the substack, and the VFYW is one of the principle reasons I subscribed to the substack as soon as it was launched.
So that’s where I come from with my suggestion: I like the way that you boldface the increasingly accurate geographical descriptors as you build up to the answer. I also appreciate that you often include followups from previous weeks at the start — even if I don’t always have time to read. So: I’d suggest that you put in boldface the phrase this week’s view for those of us who, in any particular week, just want to skip down to it.
A great suggestion, though I’ve already started to introduce the latest VFYW guesses by beginning a sentence with, “On to this week’s view.” Thanks to our sleuth’s suggestion, I’ll codify that phrase from now on, with boldface — since it’s a logical extension of revealing in bold the continent, then country, then city, then building.
On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Alexandria looks to Europe:
Happy Weekend, and I hope you’re enduring this dreary weather in the DC area ... yuck. Thanks as always for keeping the contest going and doing such a great job of bringing us all together every week!
For this week, I did kind of a superficial search: a bit more than a pot-shot, but def not a deep-dive. I’m guessing the window is in the Family Suite, Room 6, at the Saltwater B&B in St. Ives, Cornwall, England. I’m not super confident but, if you squint a little, it looks like the view.
Another sleuth gets to the right side of the English Channel: “Belgium or France!” Another goes with the latter:
This is a hard one with few obvious clues, except that statue obscured by the trees. Difficult to even know the country. After considering Sonoma, CA, I was thinking of Europe and noted some of the burgundy colors. With that absurd strategy, I looked through hotels in the Burgundy region of France. Well, the trees, architecture and roads are a pretty close match. So, I am going with Beaune, France and specifically: Hostellerie Cedre & Spa Nuxe Beaune, 10-12 boulevard Marechal, 21200 (it even has a nearby statue).
The hotel in the contest photo looks too new, but I’ll bet the architects were inspired by Hostellerie Cèdre:
From the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in Plano:
So my first impression was that the architecture and fixtures suggest Europe, and specifically probably France. It might be Paris, across the road from a park, but I suspect a Parisian suburb or regional French city. If I had no time for sleuthing, I'd use Lyons as a proximity guess.
Is the Japanese-feeling tree a viable clue? Is there a Japanese garden in Paris or its environs that fits our scene? No.
There are no legible signs. The statue on the pedestal in the background is indistinct. I’m not confident I’m going to solve this one.
He eventually got the right answer, adding, “Not technically a French regional city, but nearly one.” Here’s Chini’s view, with the window circled in yellow:
As the CO/NJ biographer notes, “The red patio umbrellas can be spotted almost from outer space!”
The super-sleuth in Asheville zooms closer:
Here is an aerial view that includes many of the landmarks from the VFYW:
The two tall trees in the photo are flanking a fountain, which is not visible in the VFYW:
A fitting view for Valentine’s Day. A quick note about those two trees:
Incidentally, these two sequoia reach a paltry height of 27 and 32 meters. In their native habitat, they can reach 50-85 meters and can live up to 3,200 years. Giant Sequoia started being exported around the world in the 1850s. These two trees date to 1876 — babies!
Those trees were crucial for Berkeley’s search:
My focus shifted to giant sequoias in Europe, because that’s what the two large evergreens in our photo are. Giant sequoias are native only to the Sierra Nevadas in California, but that doesn’t mean they can’t grow elsewhere. A few are scattered around Europe, and those have all been cataloged. But because of my initial mistaken assumption about signage, I overlooked the 26 giant sequoias in [country redacted] until all the alternatives had been eliminated. A website dedicated to “monumental trees” eventually led me to our location.
Here’s the latest VFYW Reimagined by the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
I’m certainly not an architectural expert, but the building on the VFYW’s left has a classical European look with a mansard roof, dormer windows, and decorative stonework — features often seen in French Second Empire architecture — but we’re not in France. The building on its right has a steeply pitched roof and dormer windows, which are also common in traditional European architecture. And of course we don’t see the hotel itself in the VFYW, but we do see the hotel’s patio and its umbrellas (morphed here into blue):
I’m not really happy with that, so I’m going to rotate the scene 90 degrees counter-clockwise and open the umbrellas so that they stand out. I also thought to include the bicycle-lane divider (which looks like a double yellow line but isn’t):
From a recent winner:
Yellow car license plates, check. Quaint European-style house in the foreground, check. Hazy-looking object in the distance that looks like it could be a bridge over water or a dam of some kind, check. It’s the Netherlands, right?
I could not have been more wrong. Ok, I guess I could have been. I did not guess Beijing. Or Pittsburgh. But wrong I was.
He was eventually right. So was this previous winner:
Our journey began with Google revealing a map of very few places that have yellow license plates and people driving on the right side of the road:
The super-sleuth in Sydney names the right country and city:
I got (very) lucky on this one. At first I thought this was in the UK, particularly because the parked cars have yellow licence plates. But something in the back of my mind was telling me that Ye Olde England is not quite right, and to check out the Continent instead. I figured I’d narrow it down by using the only real clue — those licence plates. I quickly found this image via Reddit:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Weekly Dish to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
