Hitchhiking World Records

This is a far from complete article that needs loads of work - we need someone in the UK to go into a library and copy all details from the various editions of the Guiness Book of Records!

Until the early 1990'ies the UK edition of the Guinness Book of Records (GBOR) used to list a number of hitch-hike world records. They were

 The greatest distance hitched during a hitchhiking career The fastest time to get from Land's End to John o'Groats (and the round trip) The greatest distance hitched in a 24-hour period 

The fastest time to get from Land's End to John o'Groats (and back)
Land's End to John o'Groats is the traversal of the whole length of the island of Great Britain between two extremities.


 * Land's End to John o'Groats
 * Martin Clark and Graham Beynon. Last hitchhikers recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for the Land's End to John O'Groats trip. (17 hours 8 minutes, 1987)
 * Round-trip
 * Alan Carter. Last hitchhiker recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for the Land's End to John O'Groats to Land's End round-trip. (39 hours 28 minutes)


 * Earlier entries, according to Bernd Wechner:

  1959-63 39 hrs        - Anthony Shepherd  1965-69 29 hrs 30 min -  Ian Crawford  1973-74 29 hrs        - Bernard Atkins (1966) and J.F. Hornsey (1971) independently  1975-77 23 hrs 50 min - Pam Vere and Georgina Astley (1974)  1978    23 hrs 24 min - Miranda Brooks and Margaret Allinson (1977)  1980    21 hrs 55 min - John Repton and Rosemary Grounds (1978)  1981-88 17 hrs 50 min - Andrew Markham (1979) 
 * Single


 * Round trip

  1967-68 100 hrs 30 min - John Stubbs <li> 1973-75  77 hrs 20 min - Christine Elvery and Gwendolen Sherwin (1969) <li> 1976     57 hrs  8 min - Peter W. Ford (1974) <li> 1976     56 hrs        - John Frederik Hornsey (1974) <li> 1977-78  54 hrs 40 min - Peter W. Ford (1976) <li> 1980-83  45 hrs 34 min - Guy Hobbs (1978) <li> 1984-85  42 hrs 15 min - Charlotte Allard and Fay Gillanders (1982) <li> 1986-91  41 hrs 42 min - Anthony D. Sproson (1984) </ul>

From Key West, Florida to Fairbanks, Alaska
"A young man named Ilmar Island of Pompano Beach, Florida, Hitchhiked from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska, a distance of about 5200 miles, setting out on June 2, 1979, and arriving at his destination on June 7, just 5 days 20 hours and 52 minutes later."

Suggestions for other possible records
If you want to do something that (probably) hasn't been done before, you can try your thumb at any of these. Don't expect to end up in the Guinness Book of Records for it, they no longer seem to have a section with hitchhiking records.


 * North Cape to Gibraltar
 * Prudhoe Bay (Alaska) to Ushuaia (Argentina)
 * Cabo da Roca (Portugal) to Cape Dezhnev (Russia)

The greatest distance hitched in a 24-hour period
This record was only included in the 1991 edition of the GBOR. It was held by Prino. The actual entry on page 179 read:

"The greatest distance in 24 hours is 2318.4 km 1440.7 miles, from Southern Yugoslavia to Hamburg, West Germany on 5 July 1989 by Robert Prins of De Bilt, Netherlands. He achieved this with just four lifts."

Full details of the four rides that led to this record can be found here.

The US edition
Furthermore, the US edition also seemed to have contained a record for the fastest time to hitchhike through the 48 contiguous states (i.e. all excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and in 1979 it has published a record for a trip from Key West in Florida to Fairbanks in Alaska. Details of that trip can be found in Key West to Alaska: not without a hitch - the particular page talks about a distance of about 5,200 mile. Based on the data in said article, this might have been the route...

Further references to hitchhiking records
An up-to-date collection of hitchhiking records can be found on the records page of the Vilnius Hitch-hiking Club and additional articles on hitchhiking records were written in the late 1990's by Bernd Wechner for Suite101:

 <li>World Records: Musings on what makes a record breaking hitch. <li>More Records: Record breaking hitches in summary <li>Me Hitch-hiker, You Hitch-hikee: Turning the tables </ul>