VFYW: Where The Eagles Cry

For contest #425, we drop into a town best known for an '80s movie.

(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.)

A heads up that we might not have a window contest next week (thus delaying the results until July 12), because Andrew had to jump on a plane to England last-minute to see his dying mother. Hopefully she’ll recover, but it’s very touch and go right now. Thanks for understanding if the Dish has to take a pause for a week.

First up, the winner of last week’s contest — and one of the most moving emails we’ve gotten in a long time:

OMFG, we couldn’t be more excited! All week we’ve been talking about how many more “dark times” until Friday, so we could find out how we did. We’d love the book — thank you so much!

I promised several weeks ago to tell you why I got choked up when you honored us in the VFYW write-up by calling our entry “charming”.  It’s because my wife has stage-4 breast cancer, and she struggles with extreme fatigue from ongoing treatments. (She’s doing well overall, but it’s A LOT.) This contest gives us a new activity that we can do together despite those challenges, and it often feels like we’re getting to travel to the places in these views. It took me a minute to figure out why I was even more obsessed with VFYW than usual, and I’d had enough therapy to figure that one out on my own, thankyouverymuch.  

Our next goal: super-sleuth status!

From the super-sleuth in Sydney:

There’s an extra buzz when a VFYW is about your home country, so I really enjoyed last week’s post. While the cocktail included rum, hopefully we can get a do-over with Bundaberg Rum, which is Queensland’s local spirit. I did some further googling and found the delightful FNQ team, who make Croc Piss and a bunch of excellent Croctails — which might further inspire our mixologist? 

On the spiders in Australia, the general rule of thumb is that the bigger ones are not the poisonous ones. For example, the Daddy Long Legs is common and harmless, but with red-backs and especially funnel-webs, you’ll want to get yourself to hospital quick smart. I realise I may be putting a bunch of people off visiting, but it is actually very rare to come across any of the (many) poisonous animals in Australia.

Here’s a video on how they “milk” spiders for their anti-venom:

Here’s another followup, from our chef in Tucson:

The sleuth stories about North Queensland awakened many memories. In 1991, I dragged the family back to Australia and spent a year at Macquarie University, trying to decide whether we should move back. At the end of that year, my wife and I visited Hinchinbrook Island, hiking the Thorsborne trail and ending up at the luxurious Hinchinbrook Island Wilderness Lodge — an eco lodge that is sadly now in ruins because of financial crises and hurricanes. 

Then in 2010, we had a family holiday to Cape Tribulation, using the excuse that this was probably the last time we would be able to have a holiday as the entire family — an excuse we have used many times since for a splurge. I was into wildlife photography on that trip:

I was excited to learn of the Austin mixologist's upcoming trip to Australia. I don’t know his interests apart from cocktails, but in Canberra, the National Gallery of Art is well worth a visit. It just received delivery of a massive sculpture: “Ouroboros” by Lindy Lee. Here’s the story of how it was transported from Queensland. It was a two-week journey by a circuitous route that avoided many towns and bridges it couldn’t fit through:

The National Gallery is also the home of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles,” which was purchased in 1973 for the then controversial price of $1.3 million. The price exceeded the gallery’s authorized limit, so had to be approved by the prime minister, Gough Whitlam. It’s a wonderful painting:

I remember seeing it in Sydney when it was first purchased. It is now worth $500 million. 

From the “average super-sleuth in NYC”:

The winning sleuth from a few weeks ago said he keeps a VFYW spreadsheet and suspects that others do too. You responded that it brings you such joy that spreadsheets are being made. Well, I’m one of those other sleuths.  

Mine is more stats oriented. Just over three years ago, after I guessed that no one, not even Chini, would find the contest #263 view in El Naranjito, Dominican Republic, I suggested we also try to guess the number of sleuths who find the window. Since then I’ve been keeping track of the correct location, how many people found it, if I found it, and my guess.  

This week, looking more closely at my spreadsheet, two things jump out. First, the number of correct guessers has steadily gone up over time. Over the first 25 contest I tracked there was an average of just under 30 correct guessers. From contests #300 to #326, it was up to 36.  Over the last 25 contests the average is up to 46. I attribute this to two factors: increased number of Dish subscribers, which you alluded to last week, and improvements to search tools.

This week’s image seems easier than Cairn, so I’ll guess 57 sleuths found it.

The total for this week is indeed 57, I shit you not. From the UWS super-sleuth:

I’m sure you’ve already heard about Trevor Rainbolt, and maybe you saw the new profile in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. But just in case: “He Memorized the World With Google Maps. Now He’s Exploring It.” What a fascinating story! I’ve seen videos of him doing GeoGuessr, and it’s hard to believe someone’s brain could work this way.

I used to play GeoGuessr (before I knew about the VFYW), but I stopped because it seemed like 95 percent of the views were paths through foliage ... hardly my sweet spot!

Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.

I spent last weekend in central Illinois, after driving out in my Airstream — which I then took up to Michigan and then back to DC … so about 1,700 miles in the past 1.5 weeks:

I’m super-exhausted from all the work and travel, but I’ll share some details about the trip soon. From the Berkeley super-champ:

Woof! 165K+ subscribers to the Dish! The thought is daunting. I mean for you. And by that I mean, what if all of them started submitting window guesses?! What if just a tenth of the total readership started participating?

At the start of this year, I wrote the following to try to express what the VFYW has come to mean for me: “This strange, anonymous, quasi-community that the VFYW has become provides me more pleasure than I ever could have imagined. Developing a regular beat about cinema over the past couple of years has given me a creative outlet I hadn’t known I’d been missing.”

Next up, a “long-time subscriber who’s never submitted a photo before”:

Thought you might like this one — a view from my office window (I’m retired) in White Salmon, Washington at 4:09pm:

Keep up the good work!  Love the essays and podcasts! I await every Friday!

Back in the Daily Dish days, we had a long-standing rule against animals in window views — but this is the VFYW contest, where rules can bend. Another fantastic animal view comes from the ski-nerd champ:

Glen Ellen, CA 8.07 pm

On to this week’s view, here’s the wine geek in San Francisco:

I think my brother is resting on his laurels from last week’s VFYW, since he had no input on this week’s VFYW. Can’t blame him. I almost gave up on this one myself. I was convinced that we were somewhere in rural Connecticut or Massachusetts, so I spent a ton of time there looking for buildings like those in the photo. No luck.

But somehow, I was doing a search along the lines of “three story red brick building with an arched doorway,” and there was a screenshot from a TikTok video that caught my eye, since it looked like the right edge of the red brick building in our photo. I tracked down the video (not easy), and at the very beginning of the video, an old dude with white hair and beard is bobbing to “Baby Elephant Walk” past our red brick building. Which has a sign in front labelled “Bishop.” Holy smokes! This is the first time I figured out a VFYW from a TikTok.

From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

This week for the VFYW Reimagined, I’m sending two quite different takes. The first is a graphic novel style transformation, and the second is a blue-ink sketch version with a few selected color features highlighted:

The ski-nerd champ observes, “You had to blur at least 23 license plates this week??” Another squints:

At the top left corner of the view, I can barely make out lettering that I guessed might be the end letters to an old ghost sign for Nino’s/Dino’s/Angelo’s pizza:

The lettering is actually a remnant of a faded sign for the Eisenbeis Cracker Factory. The building was built by Prussian baker Charles Eisenbeis, the city’s first mayor, in 1888. The bakery specialized in provisions for ocean-bound shipping hardtack, ship's bread, and biscuits.

Another guess:

Asheville, North Carolina, USA? I’m not sure I can narrow it down past that, but the architecture and greenery give me that vibe. Hope it’s close! 

A previous winner gets to the right coast:

West Vancouver, BC, Canada? My only excuse for this guess is the multi-globe lamps that remind me of the similar large street lamps in Vancouver’s Gastown. Also the latitude.

Here’s Chini on high:

Here’s the beginning of the entry from the Austin mixologist:

A tough one this week. When I saw the photo I was immediately drawn to the Pacific Northwest. In fact, I thought I had been there, it looked that familiar. My first gut reaction was Eugene, Oregon, but then the houses on the hill looked more like Astoria to me. When that didn’t pan out, I worked my way up the coast.

He eventually got there, as did Berkeley — who names the right state and town:

First things first: this place sort of reminded me of Astoria, Oregon, at least more than any other place I can think of that the VFYW’s visited. That is, Astoria with the addition of a few brick Victorian buildings, plus the backsides of a couple of largish brick buildings that are old and weathered enough looking to be of that era. Throw in the retro-Victorian street lights and you might start to think the place leans into the whole Victoriana thing.

Second things second: the general coloration of the two closest license plates in the parking lot (which seeps through the blur you applied to them even if no detail does), is white up top fading to blue down below. That’s the color scheme of Washington plates: white with a blue Mt. Rainier. (It could be Kentucky, but the shade of blue in the blur seems closer to Washington’s.)

So a World Atlas article titled “These Small Towns In The Pacific Northwest Have The Best Historic Districts” seemed potentially apposite. And it was.