>I don't think you need to use a join here as long as you have set up a navigation property between Area and Route. You should be able to do your query off of Area and include the related Routes (
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738708.aspx). The routes can be referenced then from your AreaEntity.Routes collection.
Thanks Rob,
I heard about navigation properties on another forum yesterday where someone said the same thing. I'll do some digging into and then decide if I'll go back to using the Entity Framework or not.