Bill Scheller first heard about Lindau from a college friend 30 years ago, and in the following years he traveled to Germany several times. But he never saw the city. It wasn't until about a year and a half ago, when one of his Vermont neighbors returned from a European trip, that he found out Lindau was actually an island.

"The first thing my friend said," Scheller recalls, "was that he thought it was a story for ISLANDS." A logical notion and a logical person to share it with given that Scheller had previously written ten features for the magazine, involving travel from the canals of Venice to Minnesota's Boundary Waters. Lindau, he said, is "a wonderful example of unplanned urban planning and is a place where - although it sounds like the hoariest of German clich¿s - people really do walk around in Bavarian dress, including lederhosen."

Mainau was abloom with some five million flowers when photographer Macduff Everton visited the island in late April. "When you see so many flowers," he says, "it really is amazing." Having been overwhelmed by that display of color, Everton said, it was almost a relief to go to Reichenau, where instead of tulips, the gardens (and greenhouses) "were more likely to have five kinds of lettuce - and not an iceberg among them." Everton, whose heavy travel schedule (he was on the road more than 200 days last year) takes him all over the world on editorial assignments, spent last summer traveling the American West with his wife, Mary Heebner, with whom he is collaborating on a book titled The Western Horizon, to be published by Abrams in the fall.

WHO KNOWS German National Tourist Office, tel. 212-661-7200; E-mail, gntolax@aol.com. Mainau Island has an extensive Web site at www.mainau.de. Two other useful sites oriented to local tourism are www.lindau-magazin.de and www.bodensee-info.de. Lindau an on-island tourist information center located opposite the train station on Bahnhofplatz.

ROOM KEY Of the more than 600 hotels and guest houses listed on the Lake Constance (Bodensee) Web site www.bodensee-info.de, most have double rooms ranging from about $50 to $150 per night. May is a busy convention month, and although it doesn't really affect the mood of the island, Scheller notes that hotel reservations can be hard to come by then. (His booking at Hotel Stift "disappeared" when he arrived, perhaps going to someone attending a large convention of psychologists.)

CASH FLOW ATMs are easy to find.

ON THE ROAD Lindau island is very compact, and most streets are closed to non-pedestrian traffic; people tend to get around on foot or by bike. Boats are the best way to get to the majority of the attractions on Lake Constance, and you can easily catch a train to any German city. A car does comes in handy for visiting other sites around the Bodensee, especially if you don't want to be tied to the routes and schedules of excursion boats.

WHAT'S TO EAT German comfort food: sausage, veal, and pork dishes. Scheller's favorite meal was at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where he had Felchen (a local white-fish), shrimp, and cucumbers in cream sauce; he also ate well at Li Punkt, a cozy little bar serving inexpensive down-home meals, and at the Theater Cafe, which has great pastries. Everton notes that Bavarians tend to eat dinner earlier than many of their European counterparts, and that if you go to a restaurant at 9:30, "You may be out of luck."

WALKABOUT As cosmopolitan as Lindau is, one of the surprises for most visitors is that just a short walk out of town will lead you to a classic rural landscape of farms and orchards. For a souvenir of the walk, pick up a bottle of Obstler, a schnapps-like spirit with orchard overtones.

ZEPPELIN MEMORIES The nearby town of Friedrichshafen is where industrialist Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin invented the precursor of today's blimps and established the Zeppelin company. The firm is still in business, and Friedrichshafen's Zeppelin Museum covers the history of airships from the earliest days to the present, and features a mock-up of a 108-foot-long section of the famous ill-fated Hindenburg. A new smaller 12-passenger Zeppelin airship, the NT, is currently undergoing certification, and plans are afoot to offer one-hour sightseeing trips to anyone willing to part with 600 Deutschmarks.

READ IT AND LEAP Most guidebooks give no more than a page or two of coverage to Lindau and the other islands of the Bodensee, but if you read German, look for a copy of Horst Geissler's Der Liebe Augustin, a novel set in the Lindau area.