(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.)
Seems very fitting that if I’m going to win my first VFYW, it should be a window near to home. Almost felt like cheating, but I’m gonna take the W! Awesome.
I would love to get a copy of the book. I shall proudly display it, like the trophy that it is, on our mantle where all of our guests will gasp in awe and wonder. And envy, of course.
A followup on last week’s contest — which garnered 33 new paid subscriptions, a new record! — comes from a previous winner in Raleigh:
SAWEET! I picked the right window last week. It was nice to have an “easy” contest to return to after my absence. For this week, I found a key clue quickly, which made me think that we were getting another easy contest, but in the end, it was not as easy as I suspected.
BTW, since you’re a fan of Shep Fairey, he’s releasing a new print on Thursday. Here is the link to the e-mail announcement in case you are interested.
Another quick followup comes from the UWS super-sleuth:
I loved this comment from last week’s contest: “Of course, there’s also that interesting glass structure across the way. There’s no way on God’s green earth that that’s not referred to as ‘the egg,’ right?” As you and the sleuths know, I’m geeky about cognitive styles and problem-solving methods, and this is such a very nice example of lateral thinking. And it’s a lot quicker than (ahem) checking images of 40 CGI buildings ...
From a previous winner “way out west”:
Thanks for including your latest Oregon adventure in last week’s writeup. Let’s see: arrive at your brother’s house in Portland at 11pm (2am DC time!), and then up again after two hours of sleep to ski up and then down Mt. St. Helens. I was exhausted just reading about it. Oh, to be young again!
I’m happy to hear that the next-door fire in DC wasn’t any worse for you. I had a similar long-distance scare a few years ago, pre-Covid. We were visiting my wife’s cousin and her family in Fairbanks, Alaska during the winter, and while standing outside in a snowy field, I received a cellphone call from an unknown number. Normally I would let these go to voicemail, but for some reason I answered it. It was my home alarm company, calling to inform me that my alarm back in the Bay Area had been triggered. Yikes!
I had them call the local police department, who then called me after they arrived and did a walk-thru. They reported that nothing looked disturbed. I’m not sure what happened, but I’m guessing that I didn’t close my side door completely (I was in a rush as we were leaving for the trip), so it must have blown open days later, triggering the alarm.
A huge relief that your situation wasn’t any worse! But also, what a feeling of helplessness while all of this was going on in a distant state.
It sucked. But everything is mostly back to normal, and I’m currently Airstreaming in New England to get a break from the big city.
Speaking of ski trips, the ski-nerd champ (who was “the ski-nerd sleuth” before he joined the elite group of super-champs) prefers that I not shorten his name to “the ski-champ” anymore — for a very good, stylish reason:
Would it be possible to go back to my original moniker, ski-nerd champ? My license plate for 25 years:
I taught skiing for eight years, and I’m truly a nerd.
On to this week’s view, a previous winner teases the location:
Well, it’s almost not-winter up here in northern BC — the snow has been gone for a while, but spring has been cold and the wind has been unpleasant. Even the sunny days have been much cooler than usual. It’s nice to start seeing some bright sun and get some warmth, but our recent burst of sun and warmth can’t compare to this week’s location.
From the wine geek in San Francisco:
Undoubtedly true for you and many other people, my life is driven by deadlines. A lot of deadlines are a curse. I wake up in the middle of the night before a deadline sweating and fretting and swearing and turning off my alarm and thinking this sucks … and then I push all that aside to get the work done … only to do it again a few days later. What have I learned from this? Deadlines can kill you.
Sometimes, however, as crazy as it may seem, a deadline is a pleasure. Like the one for this contest. When I realize the deadline to respond to the VFYW is upon me, I actually relish it. I can cast aside everything else that may be pressing on me and spend a few hours (as the case may be) roaming around the internet/world trying to find the one location in all of Earthdom where a certain photo was taken. It typically generates frustration, surprise, anger, joy, elation, confusion, satisfaction, knowledge, and a whole lot of other feelings all in a relatively short period of time. As it has once again. And it feels great.
So that’s my intro. For this week’s location, I had no clue where to start, which usually leads me to conclude that I have no hope to solve the window and give up. But, I persisted.
And he landed at the right location. So did the following sleuth, who begins her entry:
This was my first time actually sleuthing out the VFYW (other than once before, when I had been to the place where the photo was taken). It was fun! I thought it was Latin America right away from the trees, and at first I guessed it was Mexico City. The “Entrada” sign on the building across the street from the parking lot confirmed Latin America.
Latin America it is. The CO/NJ super-champ notes, “You wrote in the VFYW caption that the beagle was added to obscure a key clue. I’m not sure if that was an editorial holdover from last week, or if you indeed forgot to place Dusty.” It’s the former — my bad. I had copy/pasted without noticing the parenthetical from the previous week. The super-sleuth in Bethlum is grateful:
Let’s hear it for corporate logos and branding this week! I suspect many of us will have latched onto the BAC logo on the glass office building in the background of this week’s view. Thanks for not deploying Dusty to cover it up!
The super-sleuth in Bend writes, “I googled ‘BAC logo’ and found this”:
A previous winner in NYC writes, “Another logo giveaway! I have to assume Dusty was sleeping on the job.” From another sleuth throwing shade:
After reading the results of last week’s contest (Lafayette, LA), I realize that this is the second week in a row when a corporate logo on a building was left exposed (CGI, followed by BAC) — both times, a humongous clue! That dog needs some specialized training!
Dusty was always a very stubborn beagle, even more so than Bowie — who had a great Resting Bitch Face:
Next up, a previous winner in Bethesda — “but sending this from Marrakech, Morocco”:
I’ve always enjoyed the View from Your Window, long before it became a game for sleuths to demonstrate their detective abilities. But now I love it even more, since it’s become something I can enjoy from a distance with my son who is away in college. It’s exciting to find new common interests with your kids after they have moved out.
Right now, the whole family is on a vacation together, so my son and I could work alongside each other on this one — an experience that brings me great joy. Thanks for providing the venue for a father and son to continue to build connections.
The contest recently rekindled an old friendship of mine. From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:
This week’s VFYW Reimagined renders the Condominio Geminis 10 complex across the street from our window. In contrast to the VFYW, I zoomed out to show both towers, the distinctive power pole and transformers, and especially the TGI Fridays at street level:
Another entry comes from a “loooooooong time lurker, frequent VFYW failure, lover of the Dish (but alas, not a current subscriber).” Lurkers can get off the fence here!
The super-sleuth in Alexandria starts to narrow down the countries:
I googled the BAC logo on the black skyscraper and found that it’s a bank located in central America: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Grand Cayman and the Bahamas. I checked out the BAC buildings in each of their capital cities and the only one with a black windowed glass building was in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I’m super shaky on this guess, but I think the photo was taken from one of the south-facing, upper floor, windows in the Holiday Inn Express in the Colonia Lomas del Mayab area of Tegucigalpa. The Holiday Inn is about a half mile from the BAC building, so I scoured the gallery of the hotel’s website to see window views that might match up … no luck.
I’ve been twice to Honduras and it’s depressingly poor. This is the only country where I have seen barefoot children picking through piles of garbage to find something to eat or sell. But Honduras has stunningly beautiful scenery, beaches (Tela and Bay Islands), and some of the little forest that remains but was exploited and ruined by the United Fruit Company in the early 20th century, earning the first citation as a “banana republic.”
Honduras during the 1920s, showing fruit loaded onto platforms
Good luck to the better sleuths out there among us — and Happy Memorial Day! It’s my 37th anniversary, so Brett (hubby) and I will be celebrating : )
Here’s the slightly redacted entry from another sleuth:
Right off, everything is in Spanish, but the architecture and vehicles are giving North-or-South-America, not Europe. The big glass building down the way has a logo on it reading “BAC”. It looks like a bank building to me, so I run a Google for “BAC banco espanol” (because I did years of Spanish language classes and they’re going to come in handy one day, gosh darn it) and it returns BAC Credomatic — a bank in six Latin American countries.
Because, unlike some of your regular contributors, I’m lazy and don’t want to go through six countries of banks, I look for “BAC credomatic edificio.” Turns out the building won an award a few months ago for sustainability and energy efficiency ... at least, I’m pretty sure that’s what the article said, but it was in Spanish.
Gracias!
From the super-sleuth in Chicagoland:
The word entrada in the parking lot (meaning “entrance”), combined with the SKY satellite dish, immediately pointed me to the Iberian Peninsula. However, a number of negative searches and the observation that those cars reminded me more of an American used-car lot than a British expat retirement community. So I focused instead on Central America.
In short order, I found that BAC stood for BAC Credomatic, a large Central American bank, and that was on the building that is most likely to appear on the front page of one of their corporate press releases or reports:
Unfortunately, nowhere in any of those <bleep!>ing reports or releases does it ever manage to say where the <bleep!> that <bleep!>ing building is!
The super-sleuth in Louisville also struggled at first:
Obviously the biggest clue/potential red herring is the BAC building across the parkway, along with the Spanish words sprinkled throughout the view that point us towards Central/South America. Once I was able to figure out that the logo was for BAC Credomatic, I figured easy peasy … not knowing that it’s the largest bank in Central America. And while this building is the one that BAC chooses to use in its annual reports and promotional material, the bank’s HQ is in Costa Rica, and it was founded in Nicaragua.
Chini didn’t struggle at all:
A Burner sleuth names the right country:
Although I spent about four months in Guatemala when I was traveling around the world in my 20s (sigh, what great memories), I never spent the night in this city. I recall the chaotic bus station in Antigua with the barkers yelling “Guate Guate Guate!” (I looked for a video, but didn’t find any suitable … perhaps barkers no longer exist?)
My guess is the pic was taken from one one of the high-end hotels in Zona Nueve or Zona Diez. Since it’s a long weekend, I may use the googles, the googles earth, and TripAdvisor to find the right hotel and guess the window.
P.S. Use the word priend (para friend) to describe friendships where I know intimate things about them and they know nothing about me, but I am genuinely thrilled they are in my life. I think you and Andrew are my oldest priends — plus we have the BAAAHS connection.
I texted that to Andrew, and we’re both chuffed. From a sleuth in Alexandria:
This one was tough, but fun! It’s obviously a Spanish-speaking country (entrada sign). I was able to figure out that the BAC logo is the BAC Credomatic, a Central American bank, but it has offices all over the region. So which city?
San Mateo names it:
This week we travel a thousand miles — due south, almost precisely — from Lafayette, Louisiana to …
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