Prino

About

Robert "prino" Prins is a 50-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 14 September 2010 he has hitched 289,892.5 km in the following 32 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 and Slovenia.

He has also been to the USA twice, 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 of French to survive when dropped in the middle of nowhere in France.

Personal hitch-hike records/statistics

Whoopie!

Career distance: 289,892.5 km (as of 2010-09-14T05:27)
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.
Longest ride: 2,502.9 km, from Platamon (Greece) (1990-08-13T16:32) to Driebergen (Netherlands) (1990-08-15T12:54).
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: 2,422.0 km in 19:43 hours (actual driving time), from Oostende (Belgium) (2010-06-14T05:49) via Germany (München(ish)/Berlin(ish)) back to Oostende (Belgium) (2010-06-16T10:06).
Best Vilniaus Autostopo Klubas traveller (distance-wise) for the club years of 2001/2 and 2007/8.

Projects

He is the author of a set of programs to extract various statistics from notes made while hitchhiking.

On the web

Daily life

In his daily life he is an analyst programmer with more than 25 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's 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.