Minneapolis, A Weekend for Lady Gaga's Mayhem

Short, sharp, and entirely worth it: we flew up to the Twin Cities for a weekend with exactly one reason on the itinerary, Lady Gaga, and she more than delivered.

Why Gaga, and getting there

Here’s the thing: I’m not really a concert person. I’ve barely been to any in my life. But I’d always wanted to see Lady Gaga live, and early in 2026 I noticed her “Mayhem Ball” tour was starting to wrap up. So I moved fast and grabbed tickets to one of the last remaining shows, because what if I never got the chance again? Some things you just decide are worth traveling for, and this was one.

I went all-in on comfort for what was a very quick trip. We flew Delta, and I splurged on first-class seats for both of us, they happened to be cheap at the time, and for a short, intense weekend it was completely worth it.

The Mall, the cold train, and a Lyft named Jubilee

We traveled up Saturday morning, and day one was essentially concert day, so we squeezed the sightseeing into the hours we had. From the airport we rode Minneapolis’s train out to the Mall of America in Bloomington, the largest mall in the country, with a whole indoor theme park in the middle. The train runs underground in stretches and it was freezing down there, but it dropped us right at the mall. We only had a couple of hours, so we just walked it and took in the sights rather than really shopping. We grabbed cookies from our favorite cookie place in the mall to stash for later, and of course ran our pre-concert ritual: as we now do in any U.S. city that has one, we found the local Kura Revolving Sushi and ate before the show. Conveyor-belt sushi then Gaga is, I can confirm, an elite combination.

Getting from there to Saint Paul was the catch, there’s no convenient train across, so we called a Lyft (my preference over Uber). Our driver was named Jubilee, which we both just loved; his car was a little messy, but we genuinely appreciated the ride, and he got us across to Saint Paul.

A massive room and a locked-up Walgreens

We checked into the InterContinental Saint Paul Riverfront (an IHG hotel), close enough to the venue that we could walk to the show. I’m honestly not sure what tier of room we booked, but it was absurdly massive, just a king bed, but attached to what felt like a whole apartment, a separate living area with its own TV that we never once used. It was wild how big it was, and somehow really affordable.

Before the show we made a supply run to a downtown Walgreens, and it was a bit of a shock: nearly everything was locked up behind cases, you had to flag down a clerk just to buy a soda, and the shelves were picked clean, whether from theft or nobody restocking. We grabbed snacks and drinks anyway, figuring we’d want something when we got back late (we did), and those, plus the mall cookies, were waiting for us after the night was over.

The show

This was, in a real way, my first big concert as an adult. I’d been to one before, Green Day, but I was something like fifteen, so this was a whole different thing. And it was absolutely phenomenal. The tour came through Saint Paul and we caught it at the downtown arena (recently renamed the Grand Casino Arena, the building most people still think of as the Xcel).

The choreography, the music, her sheer ability, every single song seemed to tell a story that flowed into the next song, the next story. It was beautiful and theatrical and overwhelming in the best way. We had LED wristbands that blinked and synced up with everyone else’s across the whole arena, so the crowd itself became part of the show. And the crowd was wonderful, so many people, plenty of them far more over-the-top than my boyfriend and me (we’re pretty low-key on the flamboyant scale). I loved seeing everyone be themselves, expressing exactly who they are inside and out. Everybody was friendly and fantastic. It was exactly the kind of night I’d hoped it would be, and proof that the gamble of booking a near-final show was the right call.

The takeaway

Some trips are sprawling; this one was a clean little spike. We had no extra vacation days to spare, so the next morning we simply packed up, took a Lyft back to the airport, and flew home, cramming everything we could into barely more than a day. Fly in, mall, sushi, get emotionally demolished by an all-time concert, fly home. Not every adventure needs two weeks and a passport. Sometimes it just needs Gaga, a plate of salmon off a conveyor belt, and a Lyft driver named Jubilee.