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Hitchhiking Records

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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

Contents

The greatest distance hitched during a hitchhiking career

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

The greatest distance hitched in a 24-hour period

This records 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."

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, Key West to Alaska: not without a hitch.

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: