James F.W., Dave Aucoin, and Emily’s Adventures in History!

This has got to be the weirdest adventure to date, mostly because it was completely random, and not at all planned. Those are often horribly fun though, as this one was. However, the down side to it not being planned was that there was no camera or anything to record the blissful events. However, thanks to “Photosuite” and “Google Image Search” this can still be a pictorial! I know you were worried; so was I. Anyways, let’s begin!

This adventure begins on Friday, January 30th, at UCCB (actually just leaving UCCB). The three soon-to-be adventurers: me, Dave and Emily, on our way home:



The odd/interesting question came up (I believe by Emily): Why is Center 200 called “Center 200"? The answer that first came up was (from Dave), because it’s from Canada’s 200th birthday. That was fine, til we remembered that Canada is not yet 200 years old, so unless the building is from the future, it was probably wrong. I then remembered that Sydney was older than 200 years old, so said that was a possibility. They didn’t believe me, so offhand I said that the “Welcome To Sydney” sign said the founding date. Little did I know that this would trigger the best adventure of the day. We were off to find that sign in Sydney River. Our means of transportation? Dave’s Minivan!



Yup, that's the beast there... sorta... Dave, with his minivan is like a little, mini Tony Danza from "Who's the Boss?" He had a wicked van in that, as you’ll recall. Anyways, we were off to find the sign, as we were into wasting time, as foolishly as possible. This seemed as good as anything else. Except, when we got to Sydney River, we found something that was a combination of disappointment, anti-town-pride, and yellowness:



Yes, our "Welcome to Sydney" sign had been replaced with an ad for Midas. This was very odd, cuz me and Dave were both unaware that we even HAD a Midas before then. Oh well. The main point, beyond disgust, was that our answer was not to be found here. We had to go elsewhere to find the date of Sydney’s founding. Emily suggested the duck pond at Wentworth Park, as there was another sign there.



So, we drove around the park for a while, almost hitting a duck lying in the middle of the road:



This prompted us to wonder why the hell ducks were still here anyways... I mean - don’t they fly south for the winter, or some such non-sense. I dunno.. It was a pretty non-thinking day, so we just took it as they were there to piss us off and get in our way of discovering history. Anyways, we got to that sign that said “Welcome to Downtown Sydney” but that’s all it said! What a lame-assed sign. It would seem our luck had run out.

We felt we had no more options. We tossed around the weak idea of going to the library, or asking people who would know, or giving up on the idea as it was retarded from the start. Then, it hit me: the statue of the founder of Sydney! I had discovered it in the summer! Surely HE would have the answer! So we headed off to find said statue of our founder with the overly classy name.



J.F.W. DesBarres! Aren’t those awesome initials? I always thought so. His little plaque thingy didn’t say what his full name was, but I’m forced to assume it was James Francis Willard DesBarres. Neat. Anyways, after a weird parking mishap, we got to the statue, as pictured above. It did indeed say when Sydney was founded: 1784. Ironically, Center 200 was built in 1984 - 200 years after the founding. Taking that as too great to be a coincidence, we figured our mystery was solved. We felt quite a bit like the kids off “Ghost Writer” which, in itself, was awesome.

We can only assume our statues will soon be put up, right next to J.F.W. DesBarres, commemorating this amazing discovery. Thanks Sydney for have an amazing history, as well as a place to get a good muffler.