(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.)
Yay! I’ll accept the VFYW book, please. Now that the pressure of winning the contest is off, I will strive to add some additional color to my future guesses.
Speaking of color, here’s a followup on a recent contest from A. Dishhead:
Hello! I’ve been meaning to make more postcards in 2024, but not every window exactly invokes inspiration. Exhibit A: [he names the correct location of this week’s view, which I’m redacting for now -C.B.] (now, if it had only been a Hampton Inn … )
But, seeing as I’d been kind of bummed I didn’t have the time to do the Maison Fournaise window, A. Dishhead style, here it is now instead! Better late than never?
I don’t know, but Andrew’s look says to me, “This is not my kind of party,” while the somewhat awkward angle of your neck says, “I don’t have enough publicly available images to be easily photoshopped,” haha. Or maybe you’re staring off into the distance wondering why Mr. Beast seems to be in this Renoir? Regardless, that beagle is definitely having the most fun ...
Nice photoshopping with the stache. Here it is last week, while I was dog-sitting my college roommate’s mutt, Xena (Pillow Princess):
In far more exciting dog-news, here are some pics I took this week of the newest addition to the Dish family, Truman:
Next up, a sleuth who got on the Correct Guesser list last week (which will help in a future tiebreaker):
A belated thank you for the kind words, Chris! I think the time has finally come for me to become a full subscriber ... I just get too much out of the free content at this point to feel good about not supporting all that you guys do.
You can join him here (or, if you’d like to introduce a friend to the contest, gift subs are here). The super-champ in Berkeley corrects my vision:
Two weeks ago in Chatou, a submission was labeled “Another close miss” when that person’s guess was, in fact, “A hit — a very palpable hit.” I suppose the sleuth didn’t help matters by opening with an illustration of his or her sightline methodology, which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, but when it came to designating the window, the sleuth put a ring around the very same one that was designated by Chini, Team Bellevue, Giuseppe (undoubtedly), me, and apparently many others:
I can’t imagine why the sleuth used an image that was shot from such a distance, at such an awkward angle, showing a truncated wall that made it easy to mistake which window was intended, especially since better images were available. Still, they got the right one.
Here’s one more followup, from the super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:
Man, that Austin contest yielded a bounty of weirdness. I truly had no idea, even having been born there and visiting over the years. Having grown up in Texas, I mostly know armadillos from seeing them squashed on the side of the highway. But one animal I do know from up-close personal experience is the jack rabbit — huge bastards with weirdly long ears:
When I was a kid, my parents sent me to a summer camp (Sky Ranch), where we slept in covered but basically open-air bunk houses, and only the metal screen kept the mosquitos and critters out. But at night, with all those warm bodies packed in the bunk house, separated only by thin screen, the jack rabbits would wake us in the middle of the night because packs of them would make a crazy noise rubbing up against the screen to filch some of the body heat. Man, seeing that was a surreal experience as a kid.
On to this week’s view, the super-sleuth in San Mateo asks:
Is that an airport in the background?
There also seems to be a lot of security. Are those poles holding up wire?
And there’s a lot of chain link fencing (too bad I can’t identify the sign):
So, contest #408 was taken from … I, Am, Stumped.
I’ve successfully identified the windows in the previous four contests, but with #408, my correct window streak has come to an end; I don’t have a guess. And of course I have no fun facts or stories for you. But I did create a picture of someone taking a VFYW from inside a hotel room:
I’m hoping to rehabilitate myself next week.
From another frustrated sleuth:
Well, a fat lot of good intuition did for me this week.
I knew the red-roof tiles are to be found everywhere in the world with that kind of hot latitude vegetation, but I was really feeling Asia. The gated security, together with American-looking road signs, made me think this is some kind of overseas military housing. I spent too much of the weekend walking around US airbases in Japan but couldn’t find a reasonable match, even in Okinawa — the only base with hills in view. Once the husband jumped in, he claimed to see grounded airplanes and a control tower in the distance. I still can’t see them, but it supports my US airbase theory.
Ultimately the landscape seemed best matched to Hickam Air Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, though I couldn’t find any housing that matched. Therefore I’m surely completely wrong, but I’m looking forward enormously to seeing the solution and reading about everyone’s rationale for finding it!
From a mother-daughter team:
Abby suggested South Africa early on. I shared that with a friend who has spent a lot of time in SA with the World Bank, and she agrees that the view could be there. Since neither Abby nor I have time to investigate further, we’ll leave it at that.
I’m thrilled with our new “mother-daughter team,” as she has already outpaced me almost every week since she started playing. Please be sure you give me full credit for all her guesses going forward ; )
Team Bellevue gets to the right hemisphere:
Welp, 13 months without missing a location, and yet all streaks must come to an end. Monday was a holiday, but our VFYW chat sent the image along with the warning, “The view looks DIFFICULT/generic,” and any pokes and glances on Monday didn’t lead anywhere.
Tuesday’s Quick Reads:
Feels like we’re maybe within 20 degrees of the equator?
Lots of red-tile roofing — that should be semi-recognizable from above.
Distinct cumulonimbus clouds, most likely the late afternoon/evening — so the big shadow from our building suggests our view is to the east, possibly a bit north?
Signage overall is ambiguous/illegible — maybe that’s a small black arrow, perhaps indicating right-hand drive?
Mountains in the distance, but nothing iconic.
*squinting* — maybe an airport tower, and the tails of some planes?
An unexplainable repeating structure that’s above and to the left of the right-most group of trees?
Really, we’re lost.
Wednesday lunchtime had the air of urgency and purpose. While we don’t feel confident there’s an airport in the distance, it’s our best guess, so we go deep. How deep? We located a list of all the major airports in the world. We filtered that to eliminate those in Europe and North America because of the foliage. Then we took the 250 largest remaining airports (across all of Africa, Oceana, South America and Asia) and looked at every single one of them. Some had nearby tiled roofs, some also had mountains, but we never found our mark. Here’s a wild guess: São José dos Pinhais, Brazil.
So we’re defeated, and now searching for two fingers of bourbon (sorry mixologist, it’s neat for us). But very curious to see how many correct answers arrive. Giuseppe? Chini? Hope they fared better than Team Bellevue.
Another goes with “Kingston & St Andrews, Jamaica”:
I fear that this entry will find its way to the top of your upcoming post, where people take stabs that are wildly off base. I thought I was doing well when I came across this picture:
But 20 minutes on Google Earth and I can’t find the same rows of red roofs that are in the VFYW, and now it’s too late to turn back. Oh well.
Another sleuth guesses simply, “Queen Creek, Arizona.” Another gets closer with “Toluca, Mexico.” Even closer:
I’m lost, but I think we’re in Panama, probably a suburb of Panama City. San Miguelito?
Also going with Panama is a “first-time guesser” in Westminster, CO:
I did a few trips down to Panama for work in the last year, and this looks a lot like Panama City’s Coste del Este area. Probably way off, but this one resonated, so I thought I’d finally take a shot.
From our UWS super-sleuth (who gets us on the right track with her second guess):
I admit to being utterly stumped. I feel like there are clues galore: that unreadable (by me) sign, the truck, those towers, the mountains ... and yet nothing is cohering for me. So I’m going no further than the wild guess of somewhere in South Africa. Unless it’s Costa Rica. All I can say with any certainty is that it’s not the Upper West Side of Manhattan!
Looking forward to being amazed by all the sleuths who will figure this out …
The most amazing sleuth of all, Chini, circles the right spot:
Our super-sleuth in San Francisco names the right country:
This week’s view has frustrated my initial attempts to uncover the source, so I am going to show my work (more to gather my thoughts and be more systematic about solving it). The terrain is rather mountainous, and the feeling is generally of a middle-income country with a Latin American feel. (The one-way sign with a white arrow on a black background with no letters provides some confirmation for this hypothesis.) This suggests Chile, where I studied 20 years ago.
The sunlight seems to be coming from the left, and it seems to be a morning scene given the lack of activity, suggesting we are looking south. The terrain suggests we are in a fairly wide basin, which could be Chile’s central valley. The town seems relatively prosperous and is home to perhaps 50,000 people.
However, after spending hours with mountainous views that are almost right, I begin to question everything.
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