And so it was that I found myself sitting on a plane returning from Norfolk to Toronto, ruminating on my trip. After three days of endless tours of faceless buildings, filled with largely forgettable people demonstrating mostly forgettable software, while I was fed wildly expensive meals and boarded in madly expensive hotels, I realized that I hadn’t taken this trip with the best of intentions; I just wanted to visit a place I hadn’t been before. And I did it with about ten Canadian dollars in my pocket. And in the end, though I have managed to compose a sprawling, willfully pretentious, digression-laden article based in my experiences, I feel unlikely to sell Virginia to anyone, a land which from the ground I remember as nothing but freeways, and from the air as only a Microsoft Flight Simulator bitmap.

Matthew Kumar knows that Ontario is truly for lovers