Hitchhiking 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!

This article is a stub. This means that the information available to us is obviously insufficient. In these places little information is available or the description is severely outdated. If you have been there, whether hitchhiking, for travel or as part of an organized tour − be sure to extend this article!

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

Special Routes

The fastest time to get from Land's End to John o'Groats (and back)

Land's End to John o'Groats

M. Clark and G. Beynon. Last hitchhikers recorded in the Guinness Book of Records for the Land's End to John O'Groats trip. (17 hours 8 minutes)

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)

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"

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

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:

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

References

• Key West to Alaska: not without a hitch.