(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.)
Highlights from this week’s write-up:
America’s most beloved captain
An American hero who avenges his dog
An underground network of tunnels over 32 kilometers long
A subterranean bubble of magma that hardened millions of years ago
“I gotta say, the Intrepid Couch Traveler touches the whimsy in my heart.”
Thanks Chris, that’s amazing! I’ll take the book please!
Cusco is a place of extraordinary history and layers of culture. We landed right in the middle of all the parades and festivals that lead up to the festival of the sun (Inti Raymi) around the winter solstice. The main square and surrounding streets are full of local groups in full parade outfit and marching band get-up. If you think the Mardi Gras in New Orleans gets intense, try altitude-induced oxygen deprivation and a marching band combining both traditional Inca songs and Shakira at epic volume. It’s quite the thing.
Anyway, thanks for the book; I can’t wait to give it pride of place back in London. Keep fighting the good fight and bringing a good dose of humour and hope every weekend!
That’s the goal, so thank you! Here’s a followup from last week’s submitter, the CO/NJ super-sleuth:
It was fun reading the responses to my window submission for Cusco. For instance, I saw the torito de Pucará on our hotel rooftop but had no idea it was anything more than a unique, whimsical decoration. It was very cool to read the story behind these objects, from the San Mateo sleuth.
The resident Burner is spot-on about the food in Peru. Among other places, we got to eat at the #1 restaurant in the world, Maido, located in Lima. In fact, of the World’s 50 Best restaurants (according to this organization), an astounding four are located in Lima — and we ate at three of them. And to augment the entry from the VFYW chef, here is our sampling of Cuy, served as part of a traditional Pachamanca (“earth pot”) feast, prepared for us at one of the Andes lodges we stayed at:
On to this week’s view, our super-sleuth in Yakima runs through a ton of clues:
Damn you, Chris. Here I am, 24 hours over my self-imposed limit of 24 hours of searching. The photo suggests Atlantic provinces or upper Midwest, but if seasonal, the snow says Southern Hemisphere. How many low-resolution oddities can one photo contain without leading anywhere?
Ridge-top towers turn out to be a dime a dozen
Graffiti inscrutable as ever
A tall, nearly windowless, brick building with a single side fan and roof vent and maybe a window in a multistory alcove — a power substation or telephone switching building? What’s more, the top third appears to have been rebuilt. Are the shadows below the side fan really illegible letters?
The grey stone building with castellated copper flashing and the bas relief of a ??? — and an odd, attached, bay-window structure
A diagonal structure behind the grey/copper building (I almost thought this might be a bascule drawbridge)
The brick building with distinctive jack-arch lintels and Juliette balconies
The two-tone, yellow apartment building with semilunes over the windows
The odd, tall, very thin, white steam-stack
The three matching castellated white towers with their dark grey appendages that look like angry cartoon-dog truck cabs
The pyramidal column cap and triangular front frieze to what might be our view hotel
What looks like impossible geometry of the structures and reflections seen through that hotel(?)’s windows
I give up. Really looking forward to hearing how others solved this.
He also made a WAG in the subject line — and guessed right. The subject line for the VFYW architecture in NYC is simply “Stumped”:
Oh well. I couldn’t find our view. So ends my longest streak at 21. Hopefully I’ll start a new one next week.
The biologist sleuth in Milwaukee was nearly stumped:
At first I thought I’d never get this one in under the wire, having left my computer at home while I was in Yellowstone. But the yellowish hotel saved my bacon.
Our super-sleuth in Austin names the right province (and thus country):
I finally found a few minutes to get an entry in for the contest. I found last week’s window (Cusco), and that was a great contest, but I procrastinated and didn’t get my entry in.
This week was also a very challenging window. So little to go on. I first thought it looked like Pennsylvania or upstate New York, but couldn’t find any matching architecture. The French-style facades in the background made me think maybe we were in Quebec, which turned out to be a good hunch.
The stone tower on the hill in the background ended up being the most helpful clue. I finally tracked down Lévis Tower on St. Helen Island in [city redacted], which allowed me to identify several of the buildings in the view.
Image sent by the DC super-sleuth
Also sent by the DC super-sleuth
A sleuth in Toronto goes with Quebec City:
For me, the giveaway here is the round tower in the centre of the picture, in the distance. It’s a Martello Tower, and specifically, the one called Martello Tower 1, which is on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. Four Martello Towers were built in and around Quebec City between 1808 and 1812, to shore up the defence of Canada from a threatened American invasion (which in fact came in 1812, but not in this area).
The Plains of Abraham are the battlefield that changed the course of North American history, where British forces under General Wolfe defeated French forces under the Marquis de Montcalm in September 1759, during the Seven Years’ War (or the French and Indian War, as it’s known in the US). This battle resulted in Wolfe’s death but soon led to the surrender of Quebec and, ultimately, to the end of French rule in North America, in 1763.
I’m too short of time to figure out exactly where in Quebec City this week’s picture is taken from, but I will leave you with this image of one of the most famous paintings in Canada, The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West, which hangs in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa:
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