VFYW: Thatched From The Jaws Of Victory

For contest #377, an especially tough one, we travel to a quaint village with violent anime.

(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.)

Looking back to last week, a sleuth gives thanks for “the trip down memory lane”:

I missed the VFYW for the first time in years because my husband and I ran the Marine Corps Half. I usually “pregame” my Sunday runs with the Dish, including the VFYW, then listen to the Dishcast as I run. But they started the race early and I didn’t get to it.

Bummer because I never even come close, and when I opened this week I recognized the view instantly — because I used to run past it almost every morning! Around 1990, when I was in college, I did a semester in Dublin, attending Trinity College. They put us up in some apartments in Lansdowne Village, which is maybe a mile from this week’s view. It was the bomb. We only had class three or four days a week, and then we’d take the DART to far-flung places all over Ireland. You can get across the entire island in about four hours, so it wasn’t hard! The only thing I didn’t do was get up to Belfast or London, because the trains were occasionally bombed by the IRA and I was scared. (I’m dating myself here for sure!)

Anyway, my favorite running route meandered through Sandymount, where the window’s located. I followed Sandymount Strand past that ugly factory, which completely ruined the bucolic Ireland of my 21-year-old imagination. (How dare they join the Industrial Revolution!) I’d run down to a beach — whose name I cannot recall — at Dun Laoghairie (which is pronounced “Dun-Leery”). There are some swanky gated houses along the way, and I was always dreaming that I’d see Bono or the Edge driving out of one and get to wave. (Cringing.)

Then I turned around, ran home and met my friends at Ryan’s Sandymount House, which is an ancient pub that opened around 7:00 am and served not much more than grilled cheese sandwiches — ham optional — with lots of Guinness and Bulmer’s cider. The girls all had to order half pints, or the old crusty bartender would give us dirty looks for being un-ladylike. It was awesome, but also explains why I needed the regular runs!

On to this week’s view, a sleuth guesses simply, “Georgetown, Colorado?” Another goes with Telluride: “I have no idea, but it feels like Colorado to me.” Another got that same feeling but settled on another country:

I looked at the mountains and my first thought was somewhere along I-70 in western Colorado. Then Alaska popped in my brain, so I searched along the railroad lines in Alaska, but didn’t find anything. Last week, a high-school classmate roadtripped from Seattle to Chicago, and her Montana pictures looked like the mountains in our photo. I traced the northern railroad route in Montana, because of the metal roofs on the buildings, but no luck. I had grand plans to look at Canadian railroad routes but ran out of time. So my guess is Western Canada.

In the back of my mind, I feel like the answer is somewhere in Europe, but either way, I’m good. Another fun week!

Here’s the Chini-eye view:

The grand champion adds a personal reflection and a clue:

At the Met here in New York, you can escape the tourists swarming the Impressionist galleries by taking a right at the top of the main stairs and heading to the Asian galleries. There, you’ll find one of the loveliest places in the city, filled with objects and paintings that depict this country’s pre-modern history, including the Edo Period. As an associate lawyer a few years out of school, I’d often go there to clear my head after a work day spent reading hundreds of documents. And oddly enough, the memory of those paintings proved very helpful in finding the way to this week’s lovely little valley …

A previous winner is stumped — but gets the right country: