(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.)
Happy 2023! The Berkeley super-champ looks around:
That tiny patch of the photo shows a tiny patch of water: a section of lake or river, not clear which. On its opposite bank, substantial homes are widely dispersed across a green slope. In the background there’s an unremarkable ridge line and behind that just the tip of a pointy peak pokes up like a solitary fang.
I concentrated on lakes, because rivers have too much shoreline and I knew it would drive me crazy if this were to turn into what Chini once called a “brute force search.” I expected it to be another Christmas Spectacular like Kugluktuk in contest #310, meaning I’d still be searching for it several days after Santa had come and gone.
Another sleuth writes, “Montana is my guess.” Another thinks it’s “Vancouver, Washington.” From a sleuth in Vancouver (where I just visited family for Christmas):
My guess is Sombertown USA:
Heh. A partial entry from the super-champ in Austin:
Well shit. I found the window location three weeks ago and procrastinated on my writeup so long that now I’ve run out of time to write anything interesting.
This was a good and somewhat challenging contest, as there was not much to go on — except for a small section of the photo featuring the mountain range and the houses on the lake shore. Here’s a little stream of consciousness write up of how I found it:
Hmmm … cars and license plates look European. Mountain range. Looks like I see some ski runs, so it must get cold. That’s probably a lake, not a river because of the sailboat. The houses have mostly yellow-tile roofs, so probably not Italy. Lots of lakes in the mountains in Central Europe. Let’s look at Google Maps. What about Bregenz? Lake looks too wide. Mountains don’t line up. The building looks like part of a university. Big university in Lausanne near the shore of Lake Geneva. Nothing seems to match.
From the super-sleuth Milwaukee:
Lake Geneva, France? I base this on the mountainous lakeshore and the elongated license plates. I got nothin’ else.
From a sleuth in Seattle:
Wow — this week’s contest is a ballbuster.
(Surprisingly, “ballbuster” does not appear on Stanford’s “Elimination of Harmful Language” list, though it clearly attributes personal difficulty to human anatomy and reinforces male-dominated language. My apologies for any harm my use of the term has inflicted upon you.)
I anxiously await Saturday, so I can see how in the world VFYW sleuths came up with this week’s location, because other than finding some bird poop at the top of the window, I came up empty. Still, I wanted to take a stab at it. (On the Stanford list, page 13, that term represents the unnecessary use of imagery of hurting someone or something. My apologies for harming you with my words yet again.)
Back in 2014 I took a lovely cruise up the Danube River. The area between Bratislava and Vienna was calm and beautiful, and that’s what this week’s photo reminded me of, so I’m guessing Bratislava, Slovakia. It’s a shot in the dark (apologies again), but it’s the best I can do. Hope you had a lovely break!
After being away from the contest for a while, a previous winner sends a charming card:
Oh how we have missed our Saturday morning fun. We’re hoping to go through some archived VFYWs in the next couple of weeks. This has been a very busy year filled with many happy and sad times. Now as it comes to an end the year we look forward to 2023 and wanted to wish you all a wonderful holiday season:
“Original artwork by Jennifer Paxton Parker … I added the Happy Holidays :) “
An analogue gift that a sleuth mailed to the Dish staff — all two of us — arrived just before I got back from the holiday break:
One respondent to the Logan, Utah contest mentioned the Bluebird diner. It is still there, and it has a companion chocolate shop where they still make chocolates by hand. I would love to send you and Andrew a care package of my favorites for Christmas. As it is now winter, chocolates won’t melt in transit.
They arrived in perfect, delicious shape:
Thank you! Though it won’t curry favor for the competition. Giuseppe teases the right location:
This week there are neither shop signs nor ship names. There are actually no clues at all, except maybe that red-and-white bollard, which brought me nowhere. You may google “lake (or is it a river?) mountains city,” hoping to hit a path to the solution, but that would entail a good amount of luck. No, the best way to proceed is to guess the country first — it’s easier than you think; the hardest part is to stay the course when your first attempts at finding the exact location fail, to cling to your intuition. Luckily, the country in question has a fair number of lakes, but it is not Finland ...
Chini also knows it’s not Finland:
For a moment this view had the best red herring in contest history. You see, I was certain that in one of the windows at right someone had posted a tiny Finnish flag. But this was puzzling, given that the rest of the view pointed somewhere else entirely. Only after I found the location did I realize it might indeed be a Finnish flag; not because we’re in Finland, but rather because we’re in one of the few buildings on Earth where every country’s flag can be found …
A previous winner names the right country:
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