User:Fverhart

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Revision as of 18:16, 13 April 2007 by 84.30.146.113 (talk)
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Hi there. My name is Frank and I live in the Netherlands.

Hitchhiking is my favourite way of travelling, which I practice when I have time: during weekends and in holidays. It is a very interesting way to be in touch with people and also a more environmentally aware and economic way of travelling fast than going in your own vehicle or by car. Anyway as far as travelling is concerned I also enjoy to move myself on foot, on bike, on iceskate, by public transport and only occasionally in my Citroen AX (that is usually with friends, and it is practical (or simply lazy) to do some bigger shopping once in a while by car). Example.jpg It can take a while before you know how to hitchhike fast and efficient and also experienced hitchhikers sometimes need patience. In my own country I rarely need more than twenty minutes to find a driver when I am in a good or reasonable hitchhiking environment. I started hitchhiking actively in spring 2003. Before that I hitchhiked on occasion, for example to go back to the starting point of a hiking trip or to get back to a camping. The first experience was in the summer of 1993, when my father in a moment decided to hitchhike with me when we were walking in the French Alps. That way we managed to get up very high on the mountain. Otherwise we would not have succeeded in doing that.

My longest ride brought me from Wroclaw in Poland to a motorway petrol station near Mönchengladbach in Germany, which I calculated as 882 kilometers (January 2007). The second longest ride was from the Polish border at Swiecko to Lierop near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, a distance of about 700 kilometers (January 2006). The ride from Pomellen at the German side of the border between Berlin and Szczecin had a length of 660 kilometers (September 2006). The fourth longest ride was from the border petrol station near Heerlen in the Netherlands to Konigs Wüsterhausen near Berlin in Germany: 640 kilometers (june 2006). In november 2003 I had a ride of 540 kilometers from service area Frechen near Köln to service area Michendorf near Berlin.

My shortest lifts include several short rides of one kilometre, which were sometimes very helpful.

The longest distances I hitched in one day was 1125 kilometer, which took about 24 hours and two times I did almost thousand kilometre, which once took about 13 hours and the other time 15 hours. I made twenty trips longer than 250 kilometers. My longest ride in the Netherlands was 265 kilometers, which was part of a trip of about 350 kilometers from Maastricht to Groningen; this is about the biggest distance one can do in the “small country” the Netherlands.

Let’s build this community! See you on the road!