Thumbing Around: Robert Prins Writes

I wasn't so sure, but we crossed the Autobahn (don't repeat this!) to the Raststaette on the other side, and hitched the 30 odd kilometres back to get onto a parallel Autobahn more or less our way. He was right, it was a good idea, we got a ride fast.

We arrived at our next services, just as Germany and Italy started their 1982 World Cup final. The Autobahn went dead as a dodo, not fun. But Germany lost, big fun! Shortly after it finished, traffic picked up again and we got a ride. In no time I was at the Dutch border and found a ride that brought me home to De Bilt.

Another year later, in 1983, I hitched to Stockholm in the mild winter. Come summer I decided that I had seen enough of Scandinavia, and went to Greece, which took me, despite asking for rides, eight days, though I did get back in only five, and after a weekend in De Bilt I managed to get to Stockholm in a mere two.

Over the years that followed, I travelled mostly to Athens, added a few more Stockholms to my tally and in 1986 I had the pleasure of breaking Ashok Gupta's long standing record (in Ken Welsh's "Hitch-hikers Guide to Europe") for the greatest distance hitched in 24 hours, covering almost 170 km more, for a total distance of almost 2100 km. Guinness didn't accept it.

A year later, in 1987, I hit rock-bottom, or more to the point, the railing in the middle of the motorway, some 100 km south of Beograd. My driver fell asleep! I got a free flight home courtesy of my travel insurance. My injuries were not very serious, a small wound on my head and a crack in my shoulder- blade, but in Yugoslavia they considered in necessary to put my entire upper body in plaster, which makes sticking your thumb out a bit hard!

1988 was uneventful, but in 1989, thanks mostly to Neoklis Adamopoulos, a Greek living in Germany, I finally earned my "15 minutes of fame" (© Andy Warhol), with a distance of 2318.4 km, from southern Yugoslavia to Hamburg. The record appeared in the 1991 edition of the Guinness Book of Records , only to be deleted a year later.

In 1990 I made my longest trip ever -- from Holland all the way to eastern Turkey via Stockholm on the way down and Greece on the way up.

Stockholm-Gallipoli was quite amazing, it took

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