Thumbing Around: Robert Prins Writes
to John O'Groats again for a change, but only made it, quite romantically, to the second round-about in Perth, before heading back to Sterling, for a good night's sleep in the motorway services. If you're not too shabbily dressed and sit out of the way, they usually leave you alone on motorway services, at least that's my experience, not only in the UK, but also in Germany and Italy.
I am determined to break the 100,000 mile barrier, but at the moment the pressure at work is such (Y2K & Euro) that I may have trouble doing it this year, although a few Friday evening to Sunday afternoon weekends may just be enough to do the trick.
And then? Actually 100,000 miles may be a nice cut-off point, although I do not rule out sticking out my thumb in Australia, the US or even Japan.
To end this tour, let's return to the question that I posed at the beginning, "How do you define the quality of a hitch-hiking trip?" It's easy, the quality of a trip is:
- Q = D * D * (Ri + Da) / (T * Ri * Da)
where D is the total distance in kilometres, Ri the number of rides, Da the number of days on which you got rides, and T the actual driving time in hours. (N.B. The unit of quality is square km per hour) As for the derivation of this formula:
- Q = (D * Velocity) / Ri + (D * Velocity) / Da
or in simple terms, cover as much distance per ride/day with a speed as high as possible.
Any Q over 100,000 should be considered a treasure, my best achievement is 116,167 (km2/hr) and looking at the other 100,000+ trips, they were also excellent in most other ways (with the sole exception of that one ride in 1987 that ended rather abruptly! Although? Well actually, it gave me the opportunity to fly again for the first time in almost a decade so it was excellent too!)
So you think I'm a bit weird? Yes, I suppose you're right...
N.B. If you're like me and have kept track of all your rides, I have just the program for you. It not only calculates that very important quality for all of your trips, but also produces dozens of weird, wonderful and mostly utterly useless tables. If you need any help using it, feel free to email me.
Editor's Comments
Robert's clearly an immaculate keeper (and maker) of records! He stands out in
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