(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.)
I’m so thrilled that I won! Thrilled and startled; my first impulse was to thank the Academy. It is such an honor to be on the illustrious list of VFYW winners. I would love to receive the book, since it’s always a pleasure to support the Dish with an annual membership subscription, which I’ll surely continue to do.
I want to add my condolences to the many you and Andrew have received for your recent losses. I wish you peace and joy in their memories, which I can say will come in time. For now, I understand the depth of grief you are enduring; it is a walk along the chasm’s edge.
Thanks so much. It’s been the most difficult year of my life when it comes to the mortality of loved ones, but I still have a ton to be grateful for. Foremost is my stepmom, Nancy, who’s been an absolute rock for my dad since his stroke two years ago:
L: My dad and Nancy during a visit to Florida last year / R: My girlfriend and Nancy during a visit to see my dad for Thanksgiving last week.
A sleuth gives thanks from Africa:
No turkey dinner in Kenya, and this pic probably isn’t appropriate for an official contest view, but here’s what Black Friday looks like in Kenya:
This is the view from my “tent” at Enchipai Camp overlooking the Maasai Mara Preserve, 6am 11/29/2024. I have much to be thankful for.
I’m very thankful to the super-sleuth in Sydney for whipping up this map:
I’ve got a bit of time on my hands, as I’m recovering from a small operation. Op went well and I’m on the road the recovery, but I needed a side project to keep the boredom away. So I thought something handy would be a Google Maps of all the past VFYW contests.
It’s very impressive how much of the globe the contest has covered!
I’ve tried to find a way to add the contest link to each location, but Google Maps won’t let you do that. If you click on each pin, it tells you which contest number it is, so that’s a start. Unfortunately, when the contest is in the same city, it will often put the pins on top of each other. I also have no idea if it’s possible to automate so it links to that archive page and adds a pin each week, rather than manually adding to a CSV file. Perhaps someone more computer literate can work that out too? (There’s a cool feature to view it in Google Earth, but I can’t work out how to make that shareable either.)
I’ll try update it every once in a while, but feel free to remind me.
Here’s a snapshot of the country with the most action — or at least the Lower 48:
And the second-most visited continent:
Here’s a followup from the biologist sleuth in Milwaukee:
The Orderville write-up made me feel seriously inadequate, since every sleuth pointed out something I hadn’t noticed. “Wait, there was a coffee shop in the photo? — Wait, there was a quilt shop? A swimming pool? A motel?” I still can’t spot the post office one of them refers to. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, because my method seems to work, but it makes me realize how little of the world around me I actually see.
I really enjoyed the Portland band Ages and Ages that one of your sleuths featured, and the end of the Dinosaurs TV series — heavy-handed but cynical, just to my taste.
This next sleuth is just now kicking himself over the Portland contest from last month:
Okay, I am embarrassed to have not delved deeper into that contest. Reading through the results, as soon as the comments mentioned the bit of the convention center visible, I realized I have stayed at that hotel … probably a dozen times or more. I literally said, “Oh my god, it’s the one on Wasco!” It used to be my go-to hotel when I would do a weekend trip to Portland a couple times a year pre-pandemic. I have street0parked by that two-story apartment building many times. Sigh.
From the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor:
Thanks for sharing my climb of the Manitou Incline last week. Here are two more photos (the left was mine, the right from online):
In a case of cosmic synchronicity, the contest comes to another incline for the view this week.
On to the guesses for that new view, a sleuth writes:
Is this Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles? Fun fact: I’m 84, and one time when climbing to an AirBnB on this hill, I had a panic attack and had to be lifted to my feet.
The super-sleuth in Alexandria gets to the right continent:
Big shot in the dark: Evian-les-Bains, France. The photo suggested to me either Swiss or Italian lakes, so I just cruised around Google to find one that looked similar. I couldn’t see any castles or other distinctive landmarks, but it had the feel of a swishy vacation destination with such beautiful scenery.
That’s all I got ... have a great week!
The super-sleuth in San Mateo zooms in:
The crucial clue came from the distinctive mountains in the distance. Here they are from the VFYW:
And here are the same mountains from a photo I found online from the vicinity of our window:
Bingo!
So this week’s VFYW Reimagined reimagines those very mountains:
Or perhaps as a black-and-white etching?
He also writes a haiku:
Seeking through the panes, The right view emerges clear, Window found, joy gained.
From the beginning of the entry from our super-sleuth in San Fran:
This week is unmistakably the very northern part of Italy or very southern part of the Italian side of Switzerland. Fortunately, we have a lot of topography this week to orient ourselves. We are looking from a steep mountainside across a narrow lake toward a gentle valley with low mountains on one side and big hills on the other.
He settled on “the very northern part of Italy” — which is correct. From a previous winner who eventually got to the right place:
Despite having a pretty good hunch about where this view is — I spent some time scanning the shores of my first guess, Lago Maggiore — and despite moving eastward and finding the right general area after not too long, pinpointing the location of the view took longer. Locating the stone walls (circled below) on Google Earth was the key to reverse engineering a search area:
This next sleuth gets close and names the right lake:
My guess is that the picture is of Lake Como (based on my familiarity with the location from watching an episode of The Amazing Race one time), and specifically the picture is taken from the Hotel Il Perlo. It would be exciting to be right! I’m prepared to be wrong.
Chini serves up a stunning view and circles the right spot high above the lake:
Here’s the super-sleuth in Brookline:
What a view! My immediate reaction was that this must be some gorgeous and highly desirable part of the world — ideal as an exclusive retreat for the rich and famous. The architecture, vegetation, rolling mountains, etc. seemed like Europe south of the Alps and north of the Mediterranean, so it struck me that perhaps the body of water visible might be the magnate magnet Lake Como.
I started on Google Earth by looking along the edges of the lake near the city of Como to find the grand structure and nearby boathouse visible in the VFYW. Soon enough, I found the same structures by the lake and matched the main building to the Villa del Grumello, an elegant villa popular for weddings and other private events:
A previous winner names one of the towns on the lake:
Back to a bit of a SWAG this week: Bellagio, in the Italian province of Como? I work for a client who is always saying she wants to have a team meeting in Italy with a view of Lake Como. All the photos she sends out resemble this week’s view, so I’ll guess the photo was taken in Bellagio — partly because of its central location on the lake and partly because it’s a favorite blackjack haunt here in Vegas.
Wish I had more of a chance to track this down, but Friendsgiving preparations are calling. Hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving wherever you’re parking the Airstream this year!
It’s parked in storage, and I had to scramble to winterize it last weekend when a bitter cold snap descended on DC. Always an annoying annual ritual.
Our super-sleuth in Chicagoland, after naming the right town, gets to the crux of this week’s contest:
The steep terrain made finding the correct building challenging and the correct window nearly impossible, as Street View had no view at all of that side of the ... wait ... a funicular station? What fun!
I took my kids to their first funicular just a few months ago when we took one up to Sacré-Cœur in Paris. So few and far between for such a practical mode of transportation. Plus, of all the modes of public transportation, funicular is almost certainly the one that is hardest to say five times in a row without stuttering. Take that, monorail!
Image sent by the DC super-sleuth
I recalled long ago a VFYW taken from a car, so I thought this could be the first ever View From Your Funicular, which sounds kinda kinky. Props to the photographer: managing to avoid people in the image is pretty impressive, judging by almost every other image of that station I can find on the webs.
We covered funiculars in the contests for Bogotá and Honiara, but it’s indeed our first VFYF. Here’s Eagle Rock:
Oh man, I love a view with a funicular! And this one is no joke. The funicular from our Solomon Islands view (in Honiara) was a minor amusement. But this thing is intense. It runs 2/3 of a mile up from Lake Como.
But which town is home to this funicular station? This sleuth names it:
I almost never submit for this contest, but I’m absolutely sure of the location this week.
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