(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.)
Some highlights from this week’s write-up:
A strongman assassinated with swords.
A cliff used for executions.
The “sacred birthplace” of yogurt.
Sumo.
Homer’s favorite valley for wine (the ancient Homer, not the d’oh one).
From the winner of our latest contest:
Thank you! Glad to take the win for my hometown! I’d love a copy of the VFYW book.
I’m planning to keep re-upping my Dish subscription as long as you all keep putting it out, and I’m increasing my contribution to a Founder’s level per the appeal yesterday. The Dish is an invaluable part of my weekly life rhythm and a great goad to my own thinking, and has been for years. Thank you for all that you do.
Andrew and I are quite grateful. Here’s a followup for the last contest of 2025, from our super-sleuth in Vancouver, WA:
Happy Holidays, Chris, from the soggy Pacific Northwest! I hope you and Andrew and all your families have a fun and restful vacation! Last week’s view was so hard I gave up. Turns out I’ve stayed in that town several times and didn’t recognize it at all. Redding is a halfway point on the road trip from home to my sister’s place in Santa Rosa, and I may have even stayed in that hotel.
Another sleuth writes this week:
It’s good to have the contest back from the holidays. I was surprised at how often my mind turned in anticipation toward the VFYW only for me to remember that you were both on a well-deserved break!
Notes from the UWS super-sleuth are always charming:
I hope you had an enjoyable and restorative holiday! I missed you ... did you miss us?
While I’ve never given birth, I’ve heard women with kids say that there’s a type of amnesia that comes over them after they go through that pain — which makes them willing endure it yet again. I hope a similar mechanism will work its magic on you, so that you’ll jump right back into the VFYW fray, forgetting just how much work it takes to turn our contributions into a coherent and enjoyable narrative week after week after week!
It’s always a slog, but always worth it — for the best readership ever. Here’s a somber note from our super-sleuth in Sydney:
It has been a heartbreaking week. We live about a mile from Bondi Beach, and last Sunday’s massacre — 15 innocent lives, from a 10-year-old girl to an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor — has affected our local Jewish community in a mix of emotions: grief, anger, disgust, fear, and, despite it all, hope.
There are some slim silver linings. The heroism of many, especially a local (Muslim) man who tackled one of the shooters, demonstrated an instinct to run towards danger and look out for their fellow Aussies that harks back to an earlier Australian ethos. The violence was so shocking it has awoken the majority here to the dangers that have manifested for years and grown unchecked the past two years in particular. So the quiet smugness of Australians thinking this doesn’t happen here is over. The reaction has been immense and heartening, because Sunday was an attack not just on Jews but on the Australian way of life.
I attended a service this week at the site of the shooting:
Lessons will be learnt, perhaps none more important that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The irony was this happened on the first night of Chanukah — the Jewish festival that celebrates light, overcoming adversity, and triumphing over those who wish us ill. I’m a realistic optimist: this country is better than this evil, but it has taken evil to remind us what it takes to be good. Never again.
Another sobering look at one of the biggest stories of 2025 comes from Rob Montz, the filmmaker I’ve mentioned before who spent much of the past year making a short doc about the devastation in the Pacific Palisades, where he grew up — and where his mother and a couple of sleuths lost their homes. Rob’s final product is below, and it’s bracing:
On to this week’s view, here’s the super-sleuth in Fort Collins:
This week’s contest was another gem. The clay rooftops immediately reminded me of our trip to Romania a few weeks ago, so I thought we were in the same zip code. Then I spotted the flag on the very right-hand edge of the photo [seen below], and the mural in the top left-hand part suggested a link to the Crusades, so ... off we go on the search.
From the previous winner in Sherman Oaks:
A beautiful cliff-side town with a picturesque babbling brook running down the middle made it a nice place to look for. I noticed what I thought was a unique church in the back with a cross on the top of the spire, and one on top of its dome. Apparently that church style is common with Orthodox Churches. I noticed a mountain range in the north and started looking at all the churches in the little mountain villages there. No luck.
Here’s the “a-maize-ing sleuth in Ann Arbor”:
This view reminds me of Porto, the Portuguese city that also has many colorful hillside houses. In this photo from two years ago in Porto, we were feeding birds from our hotel window:
Thank you for another year of stimulating VFYW challenges. Since my last unsolved view was the Dollar General contest from Christmas ‘24, I had a clean sweep of 2025 (not always to the right window, but within shouting distance).
Our super-sleuth in Alexandria gets closer to the right country in Europe: “I know I’m too late this week — traveling — but I’m gonna shoot you a guess anyway: Grab, Montenegro?” From the family team known as the Chapel Hill Lees:
This one I did on my own, since most of the kids are en route to be home for Christmas. I have never been to Central Europe, but as luck would have it, I watched a Rick Steves episode on [country redacted] a few weeks ago. He spends time in [city redacted], and here’s a screenshot from the beginning to the episode:
Here’s another from a native dance shown in the episode:
I’m adding this country to my list when we visit Greece and Turkey next year.
Back to our Vancouver sleuth, who reveals the right country:
I look forward to the interesting details about this city. In another coincidence for me, this VFYW turns out to be in an area we are planning to visit in the new year. We will be on an Eastern European Danube cruise and will be stopping in a town in Bulgaria not far from [city redacted]. It looks very picturesque and I know the history will be interesting. Maybe I’ll get some good views for you!
Yes please! Our UWS super-sleuth has some travel tips — and a great dispatch from Texas:
Well, my husband and I are back from a trip to Wimberley, TX — for a destination bar mitzvah, if you can imagine — and I have a View to share:
I’m just not sure you’ll be able to use it — because when I searched my emails for the receipt from the Austin Airport Hilton (where we stayed in on our last night), up popped my entry to contest #407 in Austin, TX. Too close?
In case you do want to use this, here are the deets ...
We left for the airport at the ungodly hour of 4:15am on Friday. Not that we needed to take such an early flight, but as a couple with a combined four million butt-in-the-seat miles with United, and a combined 81 years in its Mileage Plus program, we have some hard-earned travel rules for ourselves. And our Travel Dozen list (see below) includes “take the first flight of the day.”
We ended up getting to the bar mitzvah venue way too early to check in, so we went looking for a place to eat. We weren’t expecting much, since the venue was (oddly) smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood. But we found Claude’s Patio, 1 Woodcreek Circle, Wimberley, TX (it’s part of The Lodge at Cypress Falls):
Their pizza was excellent. (I say that as both a New Yorker and a frequent traveler to Italy — i.e., someone with an opinion about pizza.) And the view from the restaurant window was charming. So I decided this would be my submission.
Because there weren’t any other patrons at that moment, I started a conversation with Angie, who was running the place (at least that day). I explained what I was doing and how the VFYW contest works. I committed to sending her a link if you ended up using “her” View. This kicked off an hour-long conversation with a total stranger. We were in no hurry, we found plenty to talk about, and Angie was delightful — and very taken with the contest. The whole encounter was as much of a happy surprise as the food. A human moment. Take that, AI!
Anyway, that’s the story. And I’m happy to pass along our travel rules list. It’s a combination of long- and short-term strategies that have smoothed the way for us even during hectic travel times. In no particular order:
Concentrate all your flying with one airline that has hubs near you and in key cities you travel to. Join their loyalty program and build status: it’s what makes air travel bearable.
Do the same for hotels: focus on one provider. (We have Hilton, but if I were choosing today, I’d pick Marriott. Zillions of properties.)
Get a credit card that gives you airport lounge access for your preferred airline.
Sign up for TSA Pre-check, Global Entry, CLEAR, etc. Some credit cards will cover the cost.
Reserve directly with the airline or hotel, not through a third party.
Download and use the airline and hotel apps.
Take the first flight of the day whenever possible.
No connections unless absolutely unavoidable. Get as close as you can with the first leg and drive the rest of the way if it’s three hours or less.
Never check a bag unless absolutely necessary — preferably never.
For overnight trips, get on the destination timezone as soon as you get to the airport. Eat before boarding, skip the lengthy meal service, go right to sleep. No naps when you land.
No alcohol on the plane — dehydrates you, disrupts sleep. (I admit that my husband does not follow this rule!)
Always, always, always be nice — to the airline personnel, the hotel people, and your fellow passengers. Always.
Back to Bulgaria and the key clue to this week’s contest:
At first this looked like an impossible view, but then I noticed the flag on the right. I immediately thought “Hungary!” since it has those colors, no? In fact, no. It’s Bulgaria, which has the same colors (or very similar) but in different order:
Ok, great! Except that I know even less about Bulgaria than I do about Hungary.
Our previous winner in Roberts Creek identifies the flag building:
This view has an Eastern European feel to it, and the building on the far right appears to be some kind of institution displaying the Bulgarian flag vertically. A search for similar structures revealed it to be the the Boris Denev State Art Gallery:
Sagaponack adds, “The gallery began its life as a 19th-century Ottoman konak (governor’s residence) before it was repurposed for art rather than administration.” Our super-sleuth in Tewksbury spots another key clue:
This week’s contest was a bit of an unexpected delight for me. I really thought I had nothing to go on and just started Googling “cliff towns of Europe.” I looked at pages and pages of images of beautiful villages built into the sides of cliffs, more than I ever knew existed, but got nowhere — except to add “visit the various cliff cities of Europe” to a list of fun trips.
Then, I noticed that if I zoomed all the way in, there was a painting on the side of a building in the upper left-hand corner of the image that looked like a knight and his horse. Turns out that’s exactly what it is:
And that it’s one of two murals in that immediate area:
But none of this helped me at all. I couldn’t find a beer logo or national crest or anything that seemed to share the style of that tiny little snippet of knight and horse.
From Sherman Oaks again:
In the photo I see a mural with what looks like Knights holding a shield with a cross on it, so maybe it’s a mural honoring the Crusades, and maybe it’s a sign that the trail for the Crusades went through the town during the Middle Ages. I searched for Crusades that went through Bulgaria and found this map:
The route was that of Godfrey of Bouillon, who in 1096 traveled from Northern France to Jerusalem with 40,000 troops. The journey took three years and went through Bulgaria, and the route became known as The Templar Trail. In 2006, author Brandon Wilson walked it with his friend over 30 days and wrote a book about it — Along the Templar Trail: Seven Million Steps for Peace — with the hope it would blaze a new pilgrimage route for the faithful to follow.
It reminded me how pilgrimages are very popular for the faithful. I’ve wanted to do the Camino de Santiago ever since I saw the touching Martin Sheen film The Way, directed by his son Emilio Esteves:
I think if Andrew wants some inspiration for his upcoming book on his faith, he should look into the Camino.
Our Berkeley champ — the keeper of the cinema report — gets nostalgic:
Until this week, the VFYW’s only window in Bulgaria (which I wasn’t able to identify) was in contest #267, back when the resurrected Dish was barely six months old. Six months later, contest #286 came along to provide me a view I could identify, and that contest holds a particular place in my heart because it provided the spark that fired up my passion for identifying filming locations. A short blurb I’d written citing a scene in Amélie filmed in a wine bar near the view window made it into that contest’s writeup under the attribution “this reader.” It was just 92 words and didn’t even include a video clip, but that blurb was the kickstarter for the cinema report.
And it’s become a staple of the VFYW contest. So have the aerial views from Chini:
Our super-sleuth in Albany names the city we’re looking at:
Thank goodness for flags, even stylized ones. ...
