User:Prino
About
Robert 'prino' Prins is a 48-year old hitchhiking grandfather of two, 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 30 September 2008 he has hitched 268,235.4 km in the following 32 countries:
Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Belgium, Italy, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, San Marino, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia.
See details on his log of hitching trips.
He's fluent in Dutch and English, more than capable of speaking German and knows enough of French to survive when dropped in the middle of nowhere in France.
Personal hitch-hike records/statistics
- Career distance: 268,235.4 km (as of 2008-09-30T19:23)
- 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.
- Longest ride: 2,502.9 km, from Platamon (Greece) (1990-08-13T16:32) to Driebergen (Netherlands) (2009-08-15T12:54).
- Fastest ride: 181.9 km/h (average speed!), from Raststätte Wildeshausen (Germany) (2002-05-01T03.28) to Raststätte Grundbergsee (2002-05-01T03:47). 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: 7,943.3 km in 67:05 hours (actual driving time), from De Bilt (Netherlands) (1996-09-08T07:00) via Germany, Italy and Greece, to Culemborg (Netherlands) (1996-09-24T20:08).
Projects
- He is the author of a set of programs to extract various statistics from notes made while hitchhiking. Some of his statistics were used in Sylvain Viard's Master's thesis Auto-stop Approche géographique from 1999.
Contact
- Skype: madtruffi
- HC/CS: prino
- email: robert.ah.prins(a)gmail(d)com
