Lindau Transportation

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It is easy to get to Lindau by car : When you arrive from Austria, Switzerland or Bavaria you will be able to drive on the Autobahn / highway directely to Lindau. In Austria and Switzerland you will need a seperate highway-sticker for that, the german highways are (still ) toll-free.
My 2nd photo: In Lindau you will find several large car-parks and for all of them you have to pay an amount of about 5 euros per day! Campers / Motorhomes need to go to a seperate parking-lot that charges 0,7 euros per hour, day and night just for parking and for a place to empty your waste-water & toilet.
The old town of Lindau is on an island and you can even drive there, BUT will hardly find any parking-place, so leave your car OUTside of this island and walk a bit !

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Lindau has its own train station, right on the island in the Old Town. Lindau is a major station on the Munich-Zurich line, with even the "fastest" trains stopping here. If you're coming from Munich, however, you'll save a lot of money and not lose a lot of time by taking slower trains and using a "Bayern-Ticket." For example, if you take the "ALEX" or "RE" trains (sometimes with a change in Buchloe or Kempten), up to 5 people can get to Lindau for EUR 29 in just over 3 hours. You can shorten your trip by 40 minutes or so by taking the direct EuroCity, but you'll have to pay EUR 39 per person for the time savings.

In addition, you have good connections between Lindau and Friedrichshafen Flughafen (Airport), usually with a change in Friedrichshafen Stadt. Travel time is 30-45 minutes and ticket cost is EUR 5.30.

By far the nicest way to explore Bodensee (Lake Constance) is by ferry. There is an extensive network of ferry routes crisscrossing the lake, which services a limited number of towns on the Swiss side as well as many more towns on the German side.
Konstanz is the hub of BSB's network, and other larger towns such as Meersburg and Friedrichshafen have frequent ferry services, whereas smaller towns and those at the extremities of the lake are not serviced as often.
However, bear in mind that it is a large lake, and travelling by ferry is much slower than making the same journey by road - for example, Konstanz to Lindau (which is pretty well end to end) will take you about 3.5 hours.
The weblink below is the BSB timetable for summer 2010 - unfortunately this is currently only available in German, but much of it should be pretty self explanatory. The website promises that it will be available in English in 'a few months', but I have no idea if and when this promise will be delivered on.
The same website also gives fares: return tickets cost double the single fare. If you are going to be in the Bodensee area for some time and plan to take a number of ferry rides, it's worth enquiring about passes - when we visited in 2005, we bought a week pass, which saved us quite a lot.

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Frequent boats depart Lindau for various destinations along the lake during the summer. While service is less frequent off-season, there are still regular boats to destinations such as Friedrichshafen. For our part, we took the boat across the lake from Lindau to Rorschach, Switzerland.

As of 2008, one-way fares between Lindau and Friedrichshafen are EUR 12, and EUR 9.40 between Lindau and Rorschach. For boats to Rorschach, a Swisspass will give you a 50% discount, but note you must first validate your pass at a Swiss rail station. Fortunately for us, our boat crew allowed us the discount with our unvalidated pass, even though they were under no obligation to do so.

Ryanair fly to Friedrichshafen from London Stansted airport. It's a 20 minute train ride to Lindau from Friedrichshafen.

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Lindau station is on the edge of the island. It is a 2-3 hour journey from Munich and easy to reach from Bregenz and Friedrichshafen.