(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.)
What a great way to start the weekend! When I first started receiving the VFYW contest emails, the whole endeavor sounded impossible, so it’s been neat being able to locate a few views. The moment when you finally latch onto something identifiable in the photo and suddenly find yourself transported — through the magic of the internet — to that small part of the world is pretty cool. Now I’ve got an itch to make a pilgrimage to the Quiri Hotel and try the Pho Cocktail the next time I’m in Southeast Asia. Thanks for running such a great contest!
From the runner-up last week:
I feel like I’ve won the contest just by getting the right window. Up here in northern BC, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving a while ago, but the American blood in me (via my mother) truly appreciates your kind wishes. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, too.
On that note, here’s the super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:
I hope you had third helpings, drank too much cognac, barfed in the sink, and scared the dog as you tripped down the front steps, miraculously landing on your feet like some Buster Keaton outtake. My Thanksgiving was fine, thanks.
That’s just silly; I never drink cognac. And it was fourth helpings. Next up is the super-chef, who got out-chef’d by the animal sleuth last week:
I loved reading about the sex lives of ragworms. Makes perfect sense to pack your genitalia off for an orgy while you stay safe under your rock. And I think the ragworm fritters beat anything I wrote about!
From a previous winner:
I always enjoy your write-ups, and sometimes I also get to enjoy the thrill of finding the window (or at least the address where it’s located). Sometimes the eureka moment just doesn’t happen though; I kicked myself a few weeks ago for not finding the Nags Head window. I thought it looked like Cape Hatteras, as we used to vacation there every summer when I was little, and I looked up and down the barrier island virtually (including attempting to trace that red herring dolphin), but Wednesday came and went and I was still looking.
On the plus side, I think I found the cottage my parents used to rent in Salvo for two weeks every summer all those years ago!
On to this week’s view, here again is the sleuth in Eagle Rock — a neighborhood in LA — stirring up some Newsom/DeSantis-like shit:
At first glance, this looks a little too ratty to just be Florida. But, then again, Florida is pretty ratty in some places, so it feels unjust to cast aspersions on some other country’s beach town. Safe to say, nowhere else in the world must reckon with the #floridaman hashtag. You’d have to travel pretty far to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Florida.
FLORIDA MAN ARRESTED FOR POOPING ON OPOSSUM IN PUBLIC
FLORIDA MAN GETS CITATION FOR “BOOTY PATROL” TRUCK
FLORIDA MAN DRESSED AS A BANANA CHARGED WITH WHIPPING OUT HIS “BANANA”
NAKED FLORIDA MAN HUMPS TREE, PUNCHES DEPUTY
FLORIDA MAN GETS BEAT UP BY THE EASTER BUNNY
FLORIDA MAN BREAKS INTO HOUSE, SUCKS ON SLEEPING MAN’S TOES
FLORIDA MAN TRIES TO SHOOT PUPPY, PUPPY SHOOTS HIM INSTEAD
Those never get old. Here’s the super-sleuth in Ann Arbor:
The view this week sent us circling around various places in the Caribbean. There is a strange mix of very American elements (the cars, power poles with transformers, some of the architecture in the foreground), and other elements distinct enough to rule out the lower 48. Puerto Rico didn’t look like it either. But it’s some place with a similar status, though maybe on the other side of the globe?
Yep. The DC super-sleuth is a bit more specific:
When I first saw the contest photo, I thought that it was taken in the eastern suburbs of San Juan, Puerto Rico, probably in or around the city of Carolina, which I’ve driven through a number of times. But I could never find a view of Carolina or any other San Juan suburb that quite matched the contest photo. Turns out that I was off the mark by only 9,390 miles!
Here’s the beginning of the entry from our SF super-sleuth, who nailed the location eventually:
Something feels vaguely American (perhaps the basketball hoop in the driveway of a ranch-style house), but it isn’t certainly isn’t somewhere among the 50 states. The balustrade on the roof in the foreground gives a vague Spanish colonial feel, so I start in Puerto Rico. That turns up some vaguely promising leads, but nothing sufficiently close to convince me. Could it be The Philippines (checks the vague American and Spanish boxes)? That is a bit daunting given the 20,000+ miles of coastline in the Philippines — much of it with the nice sand beaches in the photo.
Here’s the captain of Team Bellevue, recovered from illness:
A little chicken soup and we’re back on the horse here at Team Bellevue. Our initial optimism searching for this view drained slowly but surely, feeling at times like we didn’t have a single good thread to pull on. But then one of our scouts found a promising beach shot from the correct country — and in 60 seconds, we had the whole thing nailed. Strange week.
QUICK READS
Tropical/temperate climate, beautiful beaches but no new hotels.
Likely right-hand drive given how pickup is parked
Not seeing ANY satellite dishes, which honestly confuses us
Best guess is morning, with some direct sunlight hitting the background highrises from our right. Suggests we’re looking north, ocean to the west.
Looks like a cliff/bluff on the horizon, maybe that’s something?
Okay, so no signage we can find. Wheelie bins are hopelessly generic. Basketball doesn’t help. Jet ski in the water is no help. How in God’s name are we going to figure this out??
TRIES THAT FAILED
In the undeveloped greenbelt mid-picture there’s some perhaps helpful light-barked trees. Our best guess is hevea brasiliensis (rubber tree), but that’s got a fairly wide range — no real help.
On the far horizon, there are some shapes that puzzle us:
There’s a shape that looks maybe translucent? Is this perhaps netting of some kind?
So we start jumping along coastline for anything which ~kinda feels right. Mexico thru Ecuador doesn’t turn up much.
Along these lines, another team member starts jumping around countries that touch the Pacific, looking for hotels, just hoping something turns up.
It’s indeed in the Pacific. Also:
As for nearest BELLEVUE? We’ve pivoted (perhaps permanently?) to picking the most BELLE VIEW we can fine nearby, and clearly that brings us to the bluff we mentioned earlier in Quick Reads! That bluff is actually Punto Dos Amantes (aka “Two Lovers Point”), and the spectacular view from there permits us the Chini-inspired “Belle Vue” entry:
The super-champ in Berkeley also went hunting in the Pacific:
I don’t think I’ve ever managed to I.D. an impossible one this quickly. It seemed impossible because there was nothing distinctive in the photo to search for: palm trees again, but not an overwhelming number of them; an unkempt ocean beach without surf, which suggests a reef is probably somewhere out of frame to the left; a few unexceptional hotels, one of them pink like something in Florida, only this place ain’t Florida; and on the right is a jumbled and grubby looking commercial/industrial area.
Just above the bottom edge there’s an A.C. condenser unit made by Midea, which is a Chinese appliance manufacturer but they sell their products all over the world. Elsewhere in the photo are some wheelie bins for recycling that are identical to the one in my own yard but that doesn’t mean it’s a view from my own window. It’s not like any particular place has a lock on bins like those.
Still, although this specific scene was unfamiliar, there was something familiar about the drab utilitarian hodgepodge of Western-style construction on display in the middle distance on the right, scattered like a pile of mid-century American strip malls dumped out of a dice cup. It reminded me of my time in the Navy overseas, how businesses could sprout up willy nilly near large-scale U.S. military installations. So the Toyota Tacoma king cab parked on a ragged patch of grass just added to the already growing feeling that I ought to look somewhere in the Pacific in the vicinity of a whole bunch of U.S. service folk.
“U.S. military” is definitely a big clue. The wine geek in San Francisco narrows it down further:
What caught my attention was the pink hotel off in the distance, dwarfed by two white towers alongside it. I immediately thought of the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki, but of course the beach in this photo is not from anywhere in Hawaii, and the pink hotel in the photo is also quite a bit smaller than the Royal Hawaiian. But it made me think that someone in some other US location wanted to mimic the Royal Hawaiian. I did a search for pink hotels on the beach in Puerto Rico and came up empty. Next thought was somewhere in Micronesia.
Micronesia it is, and that geek got to the right island eventually. Here’s the aerial view from Chini:
No clue provided by the VFYW oracle this week, but Eagle Rock has him covered:
I like how Chini’s clues are sounding more and more like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter:
CHINI: So you want a clue? Well, not to be all catty about it, but I just don’t feel like answering your query this week …
SORTING HAT: You might belong in Gryffindor, Where dwell the brave at heart, Their daring, nerve, and chivalry, Set Gryffindors apart ...
Giuseppe, our super-champ in Rome, guessed the precise window this week, but first he teases you mere muggles:
A comprehensive description of this week’s location, as shown in the photo, would be: a tropical city by the sea. There is almost nothing to add: no clues, no special features, nothing at all. An amorphous place; it could be almost anywhere. Except maybe one thing: that group of low buildings on the right, some without windows. They look very much like the typical American store. In a place that is clearly not the continental United States. Where then?
A previous winner knows:
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