Twin Cities Hotel Guide

Norm Coleman, the public relations savvy mayor of St. Paul, likes to say that what separates his city from its western neighbor, Minneapolis, is more than the Mississippi River. "St. Paul is the last of America's eastern cities, while Minneapolis is the first of the western cities," says Coleman.

While that opinion can be debated as long and as loudly as the myriad of other decades-long disagreements between Minneapolitans and St. Paulites, some of Coleman's words ring true when surveying the lodging scenes in the Twin Cities. Minneapolis features a downtown with streets neatly laid out in a grid, and high rising chrome-and-glass filled modern hotels that cater to business travelers, sports fans, nightlife seekers and convention-goers.

A ten-minute drive toward the rising sun brings visitors to the contrast of downtown St. Paul, where cabs wind through the oddly numbered and narrow brick streets to century-old "classic" hotels overlooking urban parks and the bend where the Mississippi continues its long journey to the sea. Theater-goers, museum visitors and those whose business brings them to the nearby State Capitol are the most common guests in downtown St. Paul. But with a new convention center and sports arena complex set to open in the heart of downtown by the fall of 2000, St. Paul's lodging base is expanding as this old town's rebirth continues.

Major lodgings in both Minneapolis and St. Paul give a nod to Minnesota's notorious winter weather, which can make travel and visits rough between November and March. Both downtowns are effectively "winterized" with a network of enclosed and heated skywalks connecting virtually all major lodgings, restaurants, offices, retail outlets and sports arenas in the cities. The result is that visitors to nearly any downtown hotel can walk from their room to shopping, sports, conventions and business meetings without needing a coat, even on days when the snow flies and the mercury drops below zero.

Just a short drive south of both downtowns, where the region's international airport provides a nice buffer zone between the cities and the suburbs, there has been a lodging boom of sorts. Natives were afraid that the once-hopping Bloomington strip along I-494 would suffer a slow death when the Minnesota Twins and Vikings moved from Bloomington to downtown Minneapolis in 1982, and the Minnesota North Stars pulled up stakes bound for Dallas in 1993.

But where Metropolitan Stadium once stood is now the site of Mall of America, the nation's largest shopping and entertainment complex (complete with four levels of shops, restaurants, nightlife and a full-size indoor theme park). Since the opening of the "megamall" in 1992, hotels catering to families and shoppers have popped up seemingly everywhere in the vicinity, giving visitors to the area an entirely new range of lodging options.

For the adventurous traveler who is looking for more than just a place to lay one's head, there are several alternatives to the urban or suburban Midwestern hotel within an hour's drive of the heart of the Twin Cities. Sleepy river towns like Hastings, Red Wing, Stillwater and Hudson, Wis., feature many charming B&Bs and classic hotels which have been restored to the look of their glory days when the logging and milling booms put these places on the map generations ago.

Each of these towns has a bustling downtown waterfront, where spring, summer and fall weekends find visitors browsing through craft stores, mulling over coffee and a good book, lounging in a host of open-air restaurants and pubs, and checking out the scene as weekenders cruise the river.

For visitors in search of 24-hour entertainment, the expansion of Native American gaming in Minnesota has meant the establishment of several genuine casino resort hotels just outside the Twin Cities, offering lodging, eateries, shopping, live entertainment and non-stop gambling options on the premises.

This lodging guide seeks to suggest a few of the places that Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding area has to offer and what might interest a particular interest and budget.

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