VFYW: Winning Your Virginity

For contest #332, we go island hopping to a majestic spot.

(For this week’s View From Your Window contest, the post exceeds the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Apologies for the late email this week. I’m up in Provincetown after road-tripping up with Bowie, and after publishing the main Dish yesterday, I ran into some very good friends I hadn’t seen in ages and needed to catch up, so I wasn’t able to wrap up the results before Saturday morning. Forgive me!

To make amends, here’s a bonus VFYW:

Bowie at her second home

“Nicely challenging contest this week,” says our super-champ in Austin:

It’s a comparatively low-res photo showing a smattering of chain islands that could be anywhere from Thailand to Fiji to New Zealand, or in this case the Caribbean. I put the over/under at 25 for how many sleuths locate the island.

The island view wasn’t as challenging as I expected it to be. I thought maybe a dozen people would get it. Our globetrotting sleuth in Alaska was a much better predictor:

My guess is that the View should garner 40 correct answers (by location), with 30 of them guessing the right hotel room and window (once you get the place, the hotel should materialize with a little effort).  

So close: 41. Chini’s entry was the first to come in, just a few hours after the window posted, and he circled the right spot as usual:

This is one of those mildly annoying views where the location is found pretty quickly yet pinning down the actual building takes a bit of legwork. But amidst the looming New York heat, it sure is nice to spend some time sorting through a slew of lavish Caribbean villas to find it.

Another sleuth serves up a closer aerial:

Our globetrotting sleuth made a miraculous guess regarding the guesses, but his own guess of the island? Not so miraculous:

We are already five weeks into the 16 weeks of Alaskan summer, so the time to participate more fully in the View contest is challenging to find. My Siberian-Alaskan partner feels particularly guilty because last week’s View was from a place she had spent some time — Malta — and she did not recognize it or put in the search time to find it. I call that a Type I error, and it stings ...

We still have little time to attack this week’s problem, but feel it should be solvable. My gut guess is that we are in New Zealand, and this vaguely reminds me of the islands between Nelson and Picton on the north end of the South Island, so that’s where I’ll land. One of the most beautiful coasts in the world. If I’m wrong about NZ, I think we are probably still in the Pacific islands somewhere …