We attended an ice hockey game and a basketball game while staying in Minneapolis. The NHL team are actually based in St. Paul which means they don’t play in the same venue as the NBA team.

If you are staying in Minneapolis or St Paul you can easily get the bus or the tram between the two. You can also take the trip out to the Mall of America and you could easily spend a day there before a game. I’m not a huge shopping fan so we decided to take advantage of the fact that we had a car and head out of the city for the day. We drive around some of the lakes that are just outside Minneapolis and stopped in a couple of the towns. Given the February weather the lakes were frozen.

We actually chose to stay in an AirBnB rather than a hotel while in Minneapolis. This was mainly a budget thing as hotels in Minneapolis were really expensive when we looked. The AirBnB has the added bonus of providing free off-street parking.

We knew that we were within a 25-30 walk of the Target Center. As the weather was so cold we looked into using the SkyWalk. For our journey to the venue we were only able to use the SkyWalk part of the way as we went for dinner beforehand and the quickest way from our accommodation to the restaurant was not using the SkyWalk. However when we left the restaurant we were easily able to use Skywalk to get to the venue without going outside.

This gave us confidence to use the SkyWalk when we left the game. Unfortunately about half way along we were met with a locked door. This was pretty frustrating as the locked door had opening hours listed on it, and the listed hours showed it should still be open. This resulted in us having to leave the SkyWalk and walk about 15 mins in -17 Celsius. Lesson learned don’t rely on the listed hours.

We could have used the bus to get the game and in theory we could have used the tram but the walk involved in getting to the tram meant it was not really an option (as it ended up being a longer option).

We sat in the upper bowl for this game. I was not very impressed with the seats. While they were padded and fairly comfortable, I had to sit at an angle in order to see the court properly. I found this really uncomfortable as the game went on, this definitely affected my enjoyment of the game. I had to twist a little to see the jumbotron as well so it wasn’t as though I could rely on that.

It felt like the venue wasn’t really designed for basketball. Though I’m sure if I was in one of the blocks at end line or along the sidelines, I would not have had an issue with the seat angle.