Robert "prino" Prins
Prino in Milan
is a 60-year old Dutch hitchhiking grandfather of four.
His recorded hitchhiking career started on 16 June 1980 at 07:47 and
he has hitched 629,106.9 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 in 2019 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
Famous for 15 minutes...
Career distance: 629,106.9 km
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, the full
details of the four rides that gave Prino his
"15 minutes of fame" can be
found here.
Best calendar month: 9,936.4 km, July 1990 - 17 hitchhiking days, the De Bilt
to Athína part of trip 11.
Longest ride: 2,502.9 km, from Platamon (Greece) (1990-08-13T16:32) to Driebergen
(Netherlands) (1990-08-15T12:54), also in trip 11.
He is the author of a set of programs to
extract various statistics from notes
made while hitchhiking. The programs are written in
Pascal
and a here is the fairly comprehensive manual.
In his daily life he is an analyst programmer using IBM's z/OS with more than
35 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 is currently "between contracts". 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.
