VFYW: The Dire Straits Of Magellan

Just follow the signs — if you can squint hard enough — to solve contest #382.

(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.)

Here’s one of the three members of the Peeping Toms who won last week:

We’ll take the Dish subscriptions, please! Tough decision, but with a book, however valuable, we would have to cut it into three sections in order to share it. And which one of us would do the cutting? Rock, scissors, paper? (Maybe penis size: but is it length or girth that wins?) It’s only through a subscription that the singular purpose in our spiritually empty materialistic lives — finding the window — can continue for another two years, free of charge.

Thanks for the recognition. Truly like a gold medal … in race-walking or something, but still a gold medal.

Another followup from last week comes from the super-sleuth in College Park:

Last autumn I visited the Bethlehem Steel plant and got some nice images. Below are a couple of them, and the third one (lower-right) is in the Nisky Hill Cemetery, near downtown, in what I call “The Most Wonderful Mausoleum in the World,” of the Mathews family. The architecture is nondescript, but the window in the rear has this astonishing photographic positive, dating to about 1918:

Another sleuth: “I continue to be amazed by the people who find the view every week and have time to write up something special.” Another something special:

Not sure if you ever posted about this before, but I was randomly reading a Buzzfeed article and came across this tidbit:

So, the oldest photograph in the world is a VFYW! 

To start us off with this week’s view, here’s a frequent sleuth:

Bareilly, India? This is my “I have no idea what to google, so let’s throw a dart at the map” guess. (There are some strange letters on the sign on the right, but I don’t know enough about languages to know what they are.)

For the record, I tried “city near mountains,” which gave me too many American answers. When I added “-United States” to the search, the entire query returned pictures in Utah, Montana, Colorado and other Western cities. That’s the exact opposite of what I told it to do. This is my proof Google hates me, as the instructions on their website are to add a minus sign when you want to restrict results. Are the super-sleuths willing to share how they get Google to ignore their location and search the wide world instead?

The globetrotter in Alaska essentially throws a dart:

A proximity guess this week: Thane, Maharashtra, India. We could blame the holiday weekend for robbing our search time, but the truth is that no amount of searching is likely to help. We think we see Hindi writing on a sign, with other signs possibly in English. The vegetation puts us in a very wide tropic to sub-tropical band, and the architecture is modern cheesy eclecticism. So of course we must be in India. 

But that is not narrowing things enough. This feels like It could be near Mumbai, which is large enough and has spin off cities like Navi Mumbai, Thane, and Kandivali that are stretched out along a mountain range like we see in the View.  But that’s as far as we got. We’re hoping to be within 200 km of the actual city — if so, we will consider this a half win.

By the way, our second choice is Cebu City, Philippines, but this is purely on Valya’s mountain-range searching. And I don’t buy it …

Valya was much, much closer. From the weekly sleuth trio in Vancouver, WA:

So many signs are visible, but they require technology that only exists in the movies:

I kept hollering at my screen, “Computer, Enhance!” — but nothing happened. One sign seems to say “thBlurrySmthg Massage.” I’ve searched so many massage parlors in Vietnam that I fear the targeted web advertising I will now have to endure!

Another sleuth gets us island-hopping:

Intuition tells me Asia. Signs are Latin alphabet. Wish I could actually identify it but can’t. I’ll go with Bandung, Indonesia.

From our frequent sleuth in Japan:

I have been quiet for a few weeks, ever since being extremely annoyed with myself for not getting Shirakawa. (I got as far as Gifu, but not the town — despite probably having been there about 100 times. Ugh). And I managed to not identify the bridge in Louisville.

Since then I’ve had the dumb luck to break my ankle (slipped in the rain) and I spent a weekend in hospital with extremely patchy WiFi trying to get a handle on the Bethlehem photo. (I was looking in Europe, which is probably why I got nowhere.) I’m out of time on this week’s photo, so I’m going to try, un-hopefully, for Daegu, Korea — based on the fact that I can see some Hangul script in the photo, and I know Daegu City lies below some mountains. That’s the extent of my spare energy this week!

Here’s Chini with the Chini-eyed view:

The grand-champion adds:

This view brings back memories. Way back in 2013, I nearly drove myself mad trying to find the exact location for View #153, mostly because the buildings in the images I searched were being torn down and replaced almost yearly. Thankfully, this week’s view featured a far more permanent skyline and was taken from a far bigger hotel.

In case you still haven’t found it, here’s one last clue (inspired by a Final Jeopardy answer from years ago): Though he traveled far and wide, indeed farther than all before, it was here that Captain Crunch’s namesake met his end …

Our super-sleuth in Milwaukee names the right country and serves up her weekly animal report: