Oshkosh — Wisconsin | Shared Latitude

A Lake Winnebago city that turns into the world's busiest airport for one week every summer, and stays a solid, unpretentious Wisconsin town the other fifty-one. Lia and I timed our visit for the quiet weeks and still found ourselves craning our necks at every small plane overhead.

We arrived in Oshkosh a few weeks after EAA AirVenture had packed up, and the fairgrounds along Wittman Regional Airport still had the flattened grass and stray tie-down stakes of ten thousand parked airplanes. Lia had heard about AirVenture the way most people have — as a strange fact, that for one week each July this becomes the busiest airport on the planet by traffic count — and even off-season, the town’s identity as an aviation pilgrimage site is impossible to miss, with vintage warbirds parked as static displays outside diners and gift shops selling patches for squadrons we’d never heard of.

The EAA Aviation Museum

We spent a full morning at the EAA Aviation Museum, a hangar-sized collection of more than 200 aircraft ranging from a Wright Flyer replica to a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, and Lia, who has no particular interest in planes, still ended up reading every placard on the World War II fighter wing. Docents there, many of them pilots themselves, seemed to genuinely want to talk, and one spent twenty minutes explaining how AirVenture grew from a handful of homebuilt-aircraft enthusiasts in the 1950s into the half-million-visitor event it is now.

Vintage aircraft on display inside the EAA Aviation Museum hangar in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

The Lake Winnebago waterfront

Oshkosh sits at the mouth of the Fox River where it empties into Lake Winnebago, the largest lake entirely within Wisconsin, and downtown’s Riverwalk gave us a good evening stroll past converted mill buildings and the old Morgan Doors factory. We rented a paddleboard near the marina and got out onto the lake itself, which is shallow enough that locals talk about it churning up fast, choppy waves when the wind shifts — sure enough, a squall pushed through while we were out, and we paddled back in laughing and soaked.

Getting There

Appleton International Airport (ATW) is the closest with regular commercial service, about 20 minutes north. Milwaukee Mitchell International (MKE) offers more flight options and is roughly an hour and a half southeast via US-41. A car is the practical way to get here and around, though downtown and the Riverwalk are easily walkable once you’ve arrived.