VFYW: Lobbing Guesses

For contest #344, we travel to a popular eatery that was recently struck by tragedy. A charitable sleuth tries to help.

(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.)

First, a followup from our super-sleuth in Kingston regarding the misidentified window from a few contests ago:

About the Kinshasa window: My son and I offer our deepest apologies to the community and hail Giuseppe as the Master. My son is not sure what happened. He says, “Could have been that the elevator took me to the wrong floor? Honestly wouldn’t surprise me in DRC.” But he was also in a bit of a hurry when he took the photo, so we don’t know.

On to this week, a Wild Ass Guess: It was going to be the coast of Maine, but I am thinking you would not do the US twice in a row, so I will say somewhere on the Swedish coast.

It’s in the US — and let’s start with the West Coast:

Little time for sleuthing this week. I’m guessing someone who knows something about boat registration will figure it out? Cuddly Hubby and I both notice pine trees and gray rocky ground. It’s not near us (Georgia), as the ground would be red clay. He thinks it is Washington state. I’m going with Friday Harbor, WA, because the late great knitter Cat Bordhi lived there.

Another Washington guess:

Continuing with my recent theme of proximity bias, I’m going to submit these Bainbridge Island vibes. This week doesn’t match up with Port Madison, where my mind immediately leapt, but it can’t be too far away, can it?

It can. From a long-time lurker in Ottawa:

15+ years of Dishness and I’ve never submitted a guess, to my recollection. But this week’s window looks a lot like the harbour of St-Andrews-by-the-Sea on Passamaquoddy Bay, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. I visited a few weeks ago. Campobello Island — the summer home of American president Franklin Roosevelt — is located in Passamaquoddy Bay. The only road to this Canadian island links it to Maine, USA.

OK, I know I have the wrong harbour, but the high tides scream that this is somewhere in the lower Bay of Fundy. The tides in the upper part of the bay can reach over 40 feet.

Also, Chris, I want to mention that your write-ups are very artful. I don’t ever want to get trapped into doing VFYW searches — I work 100+ hours a week. But I take the time to read the VFYW because you make it feel like a community, and I love geography.

The master of geography, Chini, gives everyone a hint:

Another sleuth thinks it’s Long Lake, Michigan, while another goes with Thousand Islands, New York. Another:

I admit it: this one is waaay beyond me. I’ll also admit that the existence of Sister Bay, Wisconsin was unknown to me until about 10 minutes ago. And yet that is my guess.

A lot of my extended family used to live in Door County, a gorgeous summer destination for tourists. Just this week I was catching up with an old friend who mentioned visiting Door County, which she referred to it as “the Cape Cod of the Midwest” — a great term I hadn’t yet heard. Last year the WSJ had a big spread about Door County, and I love this quote from the NYT:

“Some people call it the Cape Cod of the Midwest,” [Scott Bader, a broker at Coldwell Banker Door County Horizons in Fish Creek, WI] said. “We call Cape Cod the Door County of the Northeast.”

Fish Creek was actually the tiny town (pop. 997) where my aunt and uncle lived. Ten years ago, a Dish reader in adjacent Egg Harbor (pop. 250) sent in a window view, and when I asked if he knew them, he replied, “I work with Linda at Main Street Market here in Egg Harbor!” The VFYW has always been a small world.

A Charleston sleuth recently sailed past the Door County of the Northeast:

Here’s a photo I took from a harbor during our recent sail up the East Coast:

I waved at Andrew as we passed Provincetown, heading both north and south, but we had tide windows to make at the Cape Cod Canal, so we could not stop.

Speaking of the Cape:

The location this week is not far from Reid State Park, a lovely location. The closest mainland town would be Bath, where the Bath Iron Works builds and repairs military ships for the US government. Interestingly, once upon a time, the Queen Elizabeth II ship ran aground on a sandbar near Cape Cod, and it was taken to Bath Iron Works for hull repairs. Seems an appropriate factoid for this week.

Here’s another small-world moment involving a small town: