Green Bay

Neither Lia nor I follow American football closely, so we arrived in Green Bay unsure what to expect from a city whose identity seems fused entirely to its team. Within an hour of the Lambeau Field Atrium tour, we got it: this is the only major professional sports franchise owned by its own community, shares sold to ordinary fans since 1923, and the stadium sits not in some corporate district but in an actual residential neighborhood, tailgate grills practically in people’s front yards on game days. We walked the concourse, touched the frozen tundra’s actual turf, and left, unexpectedly, a little moved.

Lambeau Field and Titletown

Lambeau’s mystique rests on cold, hard weather as much as history — the “Frozen Tundra” nickname earned honestly during the 1967 Ice Bowl, played in conditions of minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit. Across the street, the Titletown District has grown up around the stadium with a sledding hill, beer garden, and public plaza that keeps the area alive on non-game days too. We ate cheese curds fried to order at a stand there, watching kids race down the hill on inner tubes in July, the grass long since replacing snow.

The Fox River and downtown

Green Bay sits at the mouth of the Fox River where it empties into the bay that gives the city its name, and downtown still carries the marks of its history as a fur-trading post and paper-milling town. We walked the CityDeck along the riverfront, where old industrial buildings have been repurposed into breweries and a farmers market sets up on weekends, tugboats occasionally pushing barges past. The National Railroad Museum, tucked nearby, holds one of the largest collections of historic locomotives in the country, including a massive Union Pacific “Big Boy” that dwarfed us both.

The bay itself

Green Bay is also a body of water — a long, shallow arm of Lake Michigan that gives the city its name and its weather. We drove out along the shoreline toward Bay Beach, a modest amusement park and wildlife sanctuary where locals feed chickadees straight from their palms on the nature trail, and watched freighters moving slow and low on the horizon, headed for the port’s grain elevators. It’s an unglamorous, working landscape, and there’s something honest about that after the polish of Titletown.

Getting There

Green Bay Austin Straubel International Airport sits just a few miles from downtown and Lambeau Field, with direct flights from several Midwest hubs. By car, it’s about two and a half hours north of Milwaukee via I-43, and roughly three and a half hours from Chicago, a straightforward drive along Lake Michigan’s western shore.