About Prino

Robert “prino” Prins
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Prino in Milan
is a 63-year old Dutch hitchhiking grandfather of four.

His recorded hitchhiking career started on 16 June 1980 at 07:47 and he has hitched 694,706.1 km in the following 33 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, Slovenia and Andorra.

He has also been to the USA on two occasions, visiting Austin and New York, and a few years ago, on his way to a wedding of friends in Spain, he spent a few hours in Monaco, but he has not done any hitchhiking during those visits.

He’s fluent in Dutch and English, more than capable of speaking German and knows enough French to survive when dropped in the middle of nowhere in France.

Some personal hitchhike records/statistics

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Famous for 15 minutes…

On the web

Mentioned in a Master’s Thesis

On Live on the road’s Videos on Vimeo

Prino by Sarah Franke

On the website of the Vilniaus Autostopo Klubas

On Bernd Wechner’s mirror of Suite 101

Projects

Resources

Daily life

In his daily life he is an analyst programmer using IBM’s z/OS with more than 37 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 for presentational purposes. He is also, since February 2003, the maintainer of the mini-FAQ for the comp.lang.pascal.borland Usenet newsgroup.

He is currently “between contracts”. A CV is available on request.

Trivia

The origins of “prino”?
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Corrected…

The name “prino” was “given” to him in 1974 by his chemistry teacher, Eelco Hessling. Eelco had apparently, as can be seen on the image to the right, incorrectly copied Robert’s name and surname from a school provided list of pupils(?), and, when going through this list for the first time, obviously called “Robert Prins” “Robert Prino”. The name was initially taken over by one of his classmates, Tom Bosma, but more followed in due course, and four years later he was universally known as Prino, and that name has stuck ever since.

(Deep-)Linking to this website

So you want to link to my website? No problem, feel free to link to this page, but…

…if you want to deep-link to any other pages, please tell me in advance, as it will allow me to set up an invariant page that immediately redirects to the page you want to link to, so that people accessing my site from your site or entering the URL from a book you might have written won’t be greeted by a dreaded 404 message!

Contact

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