Prino
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About
Robert "prino" Prins is a 54-year old hitchhiking grandfather of three, born in the Netherlands, but now living in Oostende in Belgium.
His recorded hitchhiking career started on 16 June 1980 at 7:47 and as of 2 August 2014 at 09:16 he has hitched 403,970.4 km in the following 33 countries:
Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Belgium, United Kingdom, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, San Marino, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia and Andorra.
He has also been to the USA on two occasions, visiting Austin and New York, but he has not done any hitchhiking during those visits.
See details on his log of hitching trips or a map.
He's fluent in Dutch and English, more than capable of speaking German and knows enough French to survive when dropped in the middle of nowhere in France.
Some personal hitchhike records/statistics
- Career distance: 403,970.4 km (as of 2014-08-02T09:16)
- Best 24 hour: 2,318.4 km, from Southern Yugoslavia (1989-07-05T00:00) to just before Raststätte Hamburg-Stillhorn (Germany) (1989-07-05T24:00). This record can be found on page 179 of the 1991 UK edition of the Guinness Book of Records, see the link from Hitchhiking World Records for full details.
- Best 365 days: 37,304.1 km, from 2013-05-20T06:40 to 2014-05-01T21:34 - 347 days.
- Best calendar month: 9,936.4 km, July 1990 - 17 hitchhiking days, the De Bilt to Athina part of trip 11.
- Longest ride: 2,502.9 km, from Platamon (Greece) (1990-08-13T16:32) to Driebergen (Netherlands) (1990-08-15T12:54), also in trip 11.
- Fastest ride: 190.2 km/h (average speed!), from Raststätte Aurach (Germany) (2010-06-14T20:06) to Raststätte In der Holledau (2010-06-14T20:50). There have been a multitude of rides where the highest speed has exceeded this value, with speeds up to around 255 km/h!
- Fastest trip: 3,186.7 km in 24:32 hours (actual driving time), from Oostende (Belgium) (2014-01-27T07:20) via Germany and Luxembourg back to Oostende (2014-01-30T14:25).
- Exceed one Light-second: On 2011-02-02T11:00 his recorded hitchhiking distance exceeded 299.792.5 km. It takes light one second to travel this distance, it took Prino, give or take a few leap-seconds, 966,674,160 times longer.
- Best Vilniaus Autostopo Klubas traveler (distance-wise) for the club years of 2001/2, 2007/8, 2011/12 and 2012/13.
Projects
- He is the author of a set of programs to extract various statistics from notes made while hitchhiking, a short description of them can be found on Prino's Programs.
On the web
Prino's Blog
- Justina & Maarten
- 2011, a review
- VAK-15 - no escape from hitching to the middle of nowhere
- Trip 1, 1980 (and as a bonus, trip 103, 2011)
- Raststätte Hopping
- Numbers, numbers, numbers
- Inga
- "So where do you sleep?"
- Looking back on 2010, a very good hitchhiking year
- Close, but no cigar…
- A trip to Denmark and Liechtenstein (way back in 2000...)
- Records are there to be broken…
- A quick trip through eight countries
- Oostende (B) - De Bilt (NL) and back
Mentioned in a Master's Thesis
On Live on the road’s Videos on Vimeo
Prino by Sarah Franke
On the website of the Vilniaus Autostopo Klubas
On Bernd Wechner's mirror of Suite 101
Daily life
In his daily life he is an analyst programmer with more than 28 years of experience in PL/I and somewhat less in DB2, CICS, REXX and IDMS. He is the author and maintainer of a set of REXX execs that can be used to convert legacy languages into HTML. He is also, since February 2003, the maintainer of the mini-FAQ for the comp.lang.pascal.borland Usenet newsgroup.
He is currently unemployed. A CV is available on request.
Trivia
The origins of "prino"?
The name "prino" was "given" to him in 1974 by his chemistry teacher, Eelco Hessling. When going through the names in his teachers notebook, he could not read his own handwriting, called "Robert Prins"!"Robert Prino". The name was taken over by a few of his classmates and has stuck ever since.