Minneapolis-St Paul Metropolitan Area
With the ever-expanding Twin Cities Area, it is sometimes hard to tell where the metro area ends and the next region begins. Smaller lake abundant bedroom communities within an hour’s drive of the downtown centers, such as Forest Lake, Buffalo, Prior Lake, Annandale and the Chisago Lakes area were once mostly small cabins and acted as getaways to city life. But now large lake homes dot most of those lakes. Closer in to the city are the larger bodies of Lake Minnetonka, White Bear Lake, Medicine Lake, St. Croix River, and about 1,700 lakes in total within an hour of the city center in any direction. Lakes to the south and straight north of The Cities are more scarce than those to the west and northeast, where the larger concentrations of lakes lie.