Discovering the Joy of Lake Life in Minnesota

15.07.2024 - 23:27 / cntraveler.com

I'm zooming across Gull Lake in a Malibu Wakesetter 22 LSV powerboat, which I've been told has enough torque to rocket me to the moon. The water is 77 degrees, warmed by a sun that just won't quit. Captain Amanda Nash and instructor Matt Soundy barely look old enough to drink, yet both are skilled wake surfers, excited to show me their TikTok moves. They're living the wet, hot American dream here in central Minnesota: zigzagging across six-foot swells, sucking down root beer floats, and partying every night after work. They're fun gossips too, pointing out the rumored lake homes of Tom Cruise and some med-tech bajillionaire who allegedly imported his own beach sand because the lake sand wasn't “white enough.” I enjoy the chitchat, but I'm here to launch my own wakeboarding career—one of several ways I'm trying to embrace the “lake life” I've heard so much about since moving to Minnesota six years ago. The state is the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” as its license plates proudly attest, but as my New Yorker husband, Andrew, and I learned, that motto rounds the number down: There are actually 11,842, if you want to get persnickety about it.

The dock at the central Minnesota restaurant and marina, Ernie’s on Gull.

Classic lake-town decor to match the throwback menu at A Pine Restaurant.

After arriving in the Twin Cities, Andrew and I fell hard for their restaurants and diverse cultural tableaux, but I could never wrap my head around the singularly Minnesotan obsession with lakes and being in them, on them, and near them. I like lakes. They're nice. But bragging about your lake house or pontoon boat to somehow signal that you belong in a state? I didn't get that.

“To fall in love with a lake is to be Minnesotan,” says Kaci Johnson, associate director of the nonprofit Legacy of the Lakes Museum in Alexandria, about 130 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Formed during the last Ice Age, the lakes have long been a point of pride for locals, drawing vacationers since the 1850s, when posh Southerners would flock to breezy Lake Minnetonka, 25 miles west of Minneapolis, for its European-inspired health-spa ambiance and see-and-be-seen social register. The expansion of the railroads increased the lakes' accessibility. Rail lines would promote lake-resort and sport-fishing packages with special fares to city dwellers fleeing the oppressive summer heat. The lakes were further democratized after World War II, when the ubiquity of the automobile and a boomlet in mom-and-pop hotels made them accessible to returning GIs and their families. “Today there are Jet Skis and hydrofoils, but people still come for the same reasons they always have,” adds Johnson, whose own family owns a cabin on Lake Vermilion in Minnesota's Arrowhead