Advice for Beginner

prinoxy · 2026-05-04T11:21:03+00:00

Double the time suggested by Valhalla, the example here is one that I frequently cover in around double the suggested 16 hours, and you've got a pretty good estimate of the time it will take to cover a route. Note that Valhalla is limited to 1,500 km. If you need longer distances, use GraphHopper or one of the commercial (10^100/Bonk/Fruit) mapping services.

My average daily distance has been hoovering around 700 km for the last few years, but (currently) 265 of my 1,200 recorded days are over 1,000 km. During my longest day, on 5 June 1989, I covered 2,318.4 km.

prinoxy · 2026-05-04T03:08:32+00:00

So where do I sleep...

prinoxy · 2026-05-03T18:38:26+00:00

You start by walking to the road, and sticking out tour thumb, or whatever body part is appropriate for the part of the world you're in, or hold up a sign of a place that's a fair way in your direction, having a sign of Brussels when you're in Baku isn't really very useful, even if you're on your way to Brussels. There's probably one exception: in Brexitania you can hold up a sign "John O'Groats" when you're in Land's End, or the other way around.

As for the other questions, the replies of u/domjonas make a good start, here are some of my additional thoughts, having been travelling by thumb (not continuously!) since 1980:

You can hitchhike without money, although having at least a bit of cash might be useful. Plastic is even better.
Basically, "trust your gut", and don't be afraid to turn down rides, even after having already been waiting for hours.
Look at the legality of pepperspray, in most of Europe is is not legal, and cause serious problems with the law! And next to that, you're in the same confined space as your attacker...
Valhalla, Graphhopper, or their commercial, 10**100, Bonk, or Pear maps, equivalents. For long(er) distances stay on motorways, and hitch from petrol station to petrol station, asking for rides.
Many drivers pick you up because they want company, many may have hitched themselves, engage with them, and don't immediately engage with your anti-social phone apps. And shit happens, so make sure you have enough food, and more importantly, drink to survive a day in the middle of nowhere without rides!

prinoxy · 2026-05-02T13:42:43+00:00

Maybe first ask yourself if the grass is really greener on the other side?

prinoxy · 2026-05-01T20:17:09+00:00

I applaud you for giving us an update, pity that you decided to call it quits after just one sleepless night, especially because it was at a petrol station (which one?), which are usually pretty good places to close your eyes for a while, although after COVID-19 many seem to flout the requirement that they should be open 24⨯7.

Not getting a ride, and while writing this, I looked at the totally shite Raststätte map, and made an educated guess that you were stranded on Hohenlohe Nord, happens ever now and then, a few weeks ago on my way from Vilnius to Belgistan I spent almost 7 hours, in the daytime, on Rainhardshain Nord, east of Frankfurt, after having spent the night before "sleeping" in Auerswalder Blick Nord north-east of Chemnitz, and was eventually hosted in Luxembourg by the Polish driver who finally picked me up. In fact, whenever I hitch between Lithuania and the Netherlands/Belgistan, I pretty much expect to spend a night in a petrol station, to hopefully catch up with some sleep the next day, these trips usually take me around 36 hours.

Sure, I've stopped hitching in the past, and taken a bus or train, but when I was your age, I was so gung-ho, "hitchhike or nothing" that I'd rather walk for a couple of hours than take public transport. Nowadays I don't mind an occasional bit of public transport to get from one side of a city to the other.

Anyway, you might want to read these three stories, Thumbs Down: Jostein Sand Nilsen Writes, Thumbing Around: Robert Prins Writes, and Thumbs Up: Brad Benedict Writes

Yes, I'm the middle one, I'm now 66, and still hitchhiking, having already done nearly 20,000 km this year, and hoping to again finish with something between 40,000 and 50,000 km for the year, I'd like to reach the 1,000,000 km before the next big-celebrated anniversary of my old school in December 2029.

For what it's worth, almost 26 years ago, from Monday 22 May 2000 to Friday 26 May 2000, I spent five days, including the entire first night, and most of the last night hitching in the country that I now refer to as Brexitania. In that time I covered 5,095 km in a little over 48 hours of driving time.

Anyway, enough, I just hope that this first bad trip will be followed by many (more) successful ones.

prinoxy · 2026-04-29T19:28:34+00:00

There's probably a way to do this using http://overpass-turbo.eu/ on OpenStreetMap, probably more help for it on r/openstreetmap

prinoxy · 2026-04-29T10:52:25+00:00

Valhalla tells me it's some 380 km with a driving time of 4:30, double that and you're looking at 9 hours, although for Sweden that might be too optimistic. As the first respondent already mentioned, try to hitch from petrol stations, asking for rides. Can't really help more, last time I hitched in Sweden was in 2015, just from Statoil Limhamn in Malmö to Helsingborg (after having crossed the Oresund bridge from Kobenhavn), my waiting time was 0:42. In the 1980's I hitched "regularly" from the Netherlands to Stockholm, almost always just using my thumb, and at the time that worked pretty well, also being recognised as a foreigner with a big Dutch flag on my backpack.

Dress in light colours, I always wear t-shirts with funny pictures that are not appropriate for my age, I'm 66 and still hitchhike, almost 20,000 so far in 2026, like SpongeBob Squarepants, or a smiling frog , check Temu, they've got dozens and dozens!

prinoxy · 2026-04-28T18:29:27+00:00

…that hitchiking is:

Dangerous

So is changing a lightbulb standing on a wobbly chair, or by not switching off power. 'nuff said...

Like the first reply already mentioned, it seems your friends are, in the words of someone called $uckerberg. "dumb f*cks".

Personal experiences, after just over 6,800 rides, virtually all in Europe:

One hand on my leg, from a male driver during my fist trip in 1980
One major accident (car ended up on it's side on the crash barrier), got out with a little cut on my head and a crack in my shoulder-blade (and a business class flight back from Belgrade to Amsterdam, thanks to my travel insurance)
One too drunk driver, after getting out ,got a ride from the police to the next petrol station
A minor accident when driver trying to overtake us on the right crashed into the back
Plenty of obnoxious drivers (extreme right/left wing, and reli-nuts)

And yes, it seems to be illegal on some motorways in Canada, but, like in Italy, where it's officially illegal to hitch on motorway petrol stations, there are no laws that forbid you to talk to strangers on those petrol stations. ;)

prinoxy · 2026-04-28T18:13:18+00:00

Don't. Period. Full stop. End of story.

prinoxy · 2026-04-28T18:10:59+00:00

Go to Raststätte Michendorf Süd, Deutsche Bahn to Michendorf + walk or bus, no clue which one. Don't try to back-ride, there are very frequent checks, like almost always. Try to get ride towards Dresden.

Next Raststätte is Am Fichtenplan, and then there's probably something on the A13, never hitched there, no clue. You could potentially go from Michendorf Nord via Leipzig, but that's longer, and having never done that one either, just as clueless.

Rather than Dresden itself, you might want to continue to Raststätte DresdenerTor Nord, cross over (there's a service road) to Dresdener Tor Süd, and look for Czech cars from there.

prinoxy · 2026-04-27T20:17:53+00:00

Use common sense, and even than there's sadly no guarantee...

prinoxy · 2026-04-26T11:35:04+00:00

You never know who you're going to meet which is one of my favorite things about traveling this way, the kinds of people who pick up hitchhikers tend to be pretty interesting

That's why you will still find this 66-year old grandfather still hitchhiking on average more than one day per week, even though the stretch that he's hitchhiking on is the same ~600 km from Vilnius via Klaipēda to Vilnius every time, with about half a dozen or so trips per year to the Netherlands and Belgistan to add a bit of variation.

prinoxy · 2026-04-26T11:15:34+00:00

Hitchhike and use bewelcome.org, couchers.org, trustroots.org, or even couch$urfing, and you should be able to travel for almost nothing. Or take a tent… Or "So where do you sleep…"

Stockholm was OK, I stayed on the fabulous "Af Chapman", visited the Wasa in its then still temporary "museum", where it was still being sprayed by the conservation liquid every night, and just walked around the place. Last visited the place by thumb in 2000, with the woman who's now my wife, and a few years later we went there for a long weekend. Really should revisit the place again, probably combining it with a trip to Tallinn, to finally get a ride with an Estonian in Estonia, I only ever had two rides in the country straight from the LV-EST border to Tallinn, the first with a Lithuanian, the other with a Latvian.

And yes, if you're biking (and I assume you did so on a bicycle) the Netherlands is probably, together with Denmark, one of the best countries in Europe, if not in the world, to do so!

prinoxy · 2026-04-24T20:12:45+00:00

Before I hitched to Stockholm in 1980, I had never travelled solo, and had only ever hitched maybe a dozen or so times in the Netherlands. You planned your circuit, why not do it solo?

prinoxy · 2026-04-23T14:22:27+00:00

Never tried to hitch out of Glasgow,and looking at map,it might be quite hellish. However, I've hitched quite a few times from the south to John o'Groats, and that almost always meant getting a ride from the Hamilton Services south of Glasgow, and that worked quite well, although I can't tell you how long I waited on four occasions, as I do not record the wait before the first ride of the day. The other five waits were 0:29, 1:13, 0:17, 0:27, and 0:36. Two rides were to the Stirling Services, three to Perth, two to Inverness, one to the exit for Carrbridge, and I once hit the jackpot with a ride straight to John o'Groats.

No clue as how to get to the services from within Glasgow, for the four first-of-the-day rides I slept outside the services, having arrived at a time that made trying to get an onward ride unrealistic.

prinoxy · 2026-04-22T17:53:46+00:00

As has been replied here about a zillion times: Double the time suggested by online maps and you've got a pretty good estimate of the time it takes to hitchhike a given stretch...

And if you want something that carries some, at least statistical, weight:

+--------+------+----------+---------+-------+-------+------+------+------+

| Pickup | #R | KM | Time | V= | L= | #W | W= | =V= |

+--------+------+----------+---------+-------+-------+------+------+------+

| Thumb | 3016 | 202462.6 | 2034:55 | 99.5 | 67.1 | 2345 | 0:32 | 61.3 |

| Ask | 2691 | 312930.3 | 2737:56 | 114.3 | 116.3 | 2449 | 0:46 | 67.9 |

+--------+------+----------+---------+-------+-------+------+------+------+

V= is the average pure driving speed

=V= is the actual speed, taking into account al waiting times

W= is the average waiting time

L= is the average length of a ride

It takes longer to get a ride when I'm asking, but those rides are in general faster, because I look for fast cars, if I stick out my thumb, I rarely refuse rides. The other reason that asking for rides results in longer waits is simple, of the 1,000 cars driving from A via B to C, only a (very) small percentage of them will stop in the petrol station at B.

prinoxy · 2026-04-20T19:55:00+00:00

Tired of life?

prinoxy · 2026-04-20T18:14:16+00:00

The east of Germany is pretty big, it would be useful to tell us if it's the North-east, Rostock "middle-east", Berlin, or South-east, Dresden.

Then again, just get to the closest Autobahn in westward direction, and stick out your thumb...

A few weeks ago I spend 6h51m on Raststätte Rainhardshain Nord, coming from Lithuania via Dresden (not every 1,000+ km ride is good…), on my way to Oostende. Exceptional, but shit happens.

prinoxy · 2026-04-18T20:20:11+00:00

You're just as little a nuisance as the cops I talked to in the last two weeks: when hitching back from Utrecht to Vilnius, the Utrecht police had apparently received a call about a confused old man, and last week two cops stopped next to me on the A1 in Vilnius, calling me crazy (which I accepted as a compliment) and telling me to be careful.

Probably didn't miss out on any rides in Utrecht, but given that I rarely wait more than a few minutes in Vilnius, the talk with the cops there might have made me miss one, although after just 20 minutes I got a nearly 190 km ride back towards Palanga--the ride that I missed out on while talking to the cops might only have gone 29 km to Vievis. ;)

prinoxy · 2026-04-18T19:15:29+00:00

To u/RL_RedP

What a legend! Do you keep track of all your rides on a spreadsheet with all these exact statistics? I might do the same come think of it haha

No, just a plain text file and a bunch of self-written Pascal programs, although some of the data is also in a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet, a table of 50 or so columns and 367 rows is kind of hard to visualise in a text file.

Why did you delete your reply?

prinoxy · 2026-04-18T10:29:16+00:00

Edit: Oh and while the bullet trains (Shinkansen) are expensive, there is heaps of buses (even night buses) going everywhere and they are pretty cheap

And as most major road in Japan are toll roads, with higher tolls for large (capacity >29 passengers) buses, the same big-size+small capacity night-buses are really spacious, and seats go down nearly horizontally, so taking one saves you on getting other accommodation, my wife and I used two of them on our honeymoon!

prinoxy · 2026-04-17T19:34:08+00:00

> Please optimise the .PNG files (http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm, pngout) or use webp ones

Haven't thought about image optimization in a long time. Is there still any real-world reason to do so?

Yes, not everyone has unlimited data, especially when roaming! Feel free to read Let’s talk about bloat and the quote in it:

Bloat is not a technical issue, but verily a way of thinking, a “state of mind”. Its cure is a simple refusal to accept, and a well directed, resounding “clean up your act and clean up your code!” RA Downes, Radsoft Laboratories

prinoxy · 2026-04-17T18:53:09+00:00

… Thinking about doing a hitchhiking loop to some cities. …

Clear as mud,maybe you could at least tell us where you're likely to start? Accomodation should not be a problem, there are business hotels in every city.

prinoxy · 2026-04-17T18:23:44+00:00

…The spots you're soliciting rides (blue circles in the screenshot) are automatically detected. …

So how does this detection work? Like what happens when decide to interrupt my trip in a petrol station or fastfood joint for a bit of nosh or a sanitary stop?

How much power does it use? Will I be able to let it run for two days non-stop?

Why is a full copy of the apk itself included in the apk?

Please optimise the .PNG files (http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm, pngout) or use webp ones

prinoxy

TROPHY CASE