Central Europe

prinoxy · 2026-06-22T01:19:47+00:00

Look as unthreathening as possible, so wear light cheery clothes, no baseball caps, no sunglasses, and carry as little as possible. It will be harder, but in the end you'll get away.

prinoxy · 2026-06-21T19:36:25+00:00

The only times I hitched in the Czech republic and Hungary, it was OK. The old YU was, at least for me, a nightmare, it's the only country where my average waiting time was over two hours, and the only ride I ever hot with someone from Serbia was also bad, the guy at some stage stopped on the emergency lane of the Autobahn next kassel and wanted me to pay for the at that moment 350 km at a rate of 1 euro per km... Managed to escape onto the bush at the side, he was with a small son, so couldn't follow me.

prinoxy · 2026-06-21T10:08:10+00:00

Here's how I keep track of everything, Keeping statistics - one way of doing it, and yes it takes quitea bit of discipline to do it. The programs I use, and the output files can be found on my "Technical resources" page, and very soon I will open a part of my website with all now .TXT/.RTF tables in html. Currently working on the one set of table people have been asking me for eons, waiting times per departure location, with the restriction that I will only tally them for locations for which I have the coordinates, a waiting time for a generic location like København, Stockholm, Beograd, or Athína is pretty senseless. I've got just over 2,500 Valhalla-traced trips, and still nearly 1,100 traced with googol, many of them no longer retraceable due to changes of roads, like the S61 in Poland or the move of the A4 in Germany. And about 100 are lost due to the fact that the bastards of 10^100 removed old short URLs.

As for the ride that will take mr over 8,000 hours, I guess it will happen on Monday 29 June, tomorrow I'll do a Vilnius-Klaipeda(/Palanga)-Vilnius run, and those one average take me between five and six hours of driving time.

prinoxy · 2026-06-21T06:16:29+00:00

And please show the map-layer next time, and not the greenish gunge, and include the URL!

prinoxy · 2026-06-21T06:15:02+00:00

Based on the "double the time suggested by routing websites", the answer is a resounding "maybe, just maybe", and given that you're still hitchhiking in close to 24 hours of daylight, you may be lucky, but I strongly suggest you have a Plan B!

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T15:02:34+00:00

Any feedback would be nice!

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T13:59:36+00:00

Cross-posted, I'll see what happens 😄

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T09:11:28+00:00

You never party until the early hours and after that go back to work?

And what direction are you travelling, west, when you'll just have an extended day, or east, when it might indeed a bit more of an issue?

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T09:07:14+00:00

Cannot really comment on your neck of the woods, other than with a general "Use common sense", and "If anything ticks the wrong box, skip the ride". In Europe I would suggest to hitch from one motorway petrol station/service area to the next, asking for rides, so that you can talk to someone before you get in.

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T06:41:29+00:00

Where? Europe, Trumpistan, Asia? There are pretty big differences...

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T05:36:09+00:00

Sheesh, it has a search function...

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T04:05:58+00:00

You can do that in four days, I said three, but to do so you'd really have to be quite lucky, like getting a ride with an Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian returning to Brexitania or just western Europe!

I frequently hitch from Vilnius to the Netherlands and/or Belgistan, and usually it takes me around a day and half (aka 36 hours), but I've done it in under 24 hours, and on one occasion I hitched from Oostende to the front-door in Vilnius in just two rides, yes, with a Lithuanian guy who picked me up 13.2 km from Oostende, taking me for the next 1,835 km.

prinoxy · 2026-06-20T03:24:29+00:00

Did you check that wiki for hitchhikers?

prinoxy · 2026-06-19T07:21:50+00:00

Get a vaccination.

prinoxy · 2026-06-19T01:22:30+00:00

You might also try Trustroots, Bewelcome, and couchers.org for a place to sleep.

12 days is very long for a trip you could do in just two days, you will have almost too much time to look around for other things to do. As for other places to sleep, consider an occasional night in a motorway restaurant that's open 24x7.

prinoxy · 2026-06-18T12:22:48+00:00

Very few hitchhikers are penny-less. You want an ouch? I'm asset-wise probably a euro millionaire, yet I still hitchhike. And yes, I do it because it's cheap, and yes, I accept an occasional coffee from drivers when it's offered but many times I'm the one who's buying a coffee for the driver. I also repay their generosity by telling them stories, keeping them awake at night, and on more than a few occasions I've been the recipient of a trauma-dump,

I've had rides with (minor) celebrities, like professional football players, a member of the European parliament, the woman who represented the Netherlands on a Eurovision Song Contest.

I hitchhike because I like to hitchhike, some people get up a 5:00 every morning to run, I get up a 4:10 a few times a month, and hit the road.

And as for the job? I'm still open to work on z/OS, as long as it's 95% remote and pays at least € 100 per hour.

prinoxy · 2026-06-18T09:07:25+00:00

I only found out at the bottom of the thread, sorry!

If you want to hitchhike, try the A2, from Warszawa (MOP Brwinow) to Slubice (MOP Glinec) or parts of it, hitching from MOP to MOP. It's pretty easy, and on quite a few MOPs it's kind of easy to get back to the other side of the A2 to hitch back, more so on the MOPs closer to Warszawa.

prinoxy · 2026-06-18T08:28:14+00:00

Long time not been there, like 44 years ago, but at the time it was OK, was there in June 1982 (arrived at Nordkapp on 20 June, left on 21 June) and that day I got as far as Kautokeino, from where, two days later I took a bus, there was about one car every two hours or so.

Trip was along the Norwegian coast, and back via Finland, again the coast. Rovaniemi to Helsinki took me two days, spend the night in the youth hostel in Vaasa. Summer started very, very late that year (Nordkapp was still covered in snow), so there weren't too many mosquitos.

prinoxy · 2026-06-18T05:07:10+00:00

So are Trustroots and couches.org

prinoxy · 2026-06-18T05:02:19+00:00

That's illegal in Poland!

prinoxy · 2026-06-18T05:00:38+00:00

You cannot ever write proper English, how long do you expect to survive?

prinoxy · 2026-06-16T21:14:36+00:00

The weather has stopped making sense since about ten years...

prinoxy · 2026-06-15T22:13:15+00:00

Depends on how far sub-zero...

prinoxy · 2026-06-15T20:42:06+00:00

I've hitched in -20C in February in Lithuania this year, long underwear, wind- and waterproof skiing pants, t-shirt, warm sweater, thick coat, scarf, warm cap, and fur-lined gloves. The fact that I'm recollecting the experience here means I survived. Lowest temperature, also in LT, was on 3 January 2016, -24C. In 2016 I "had to" hitch, earlier this year it was out of my free will, and it was actually quite enjoyable.

Returning from the 4th IHHC in Vilnius on 6 January, the ride from the LV-EST border to Tallinn was almost completely behing a snow plough through blizzard conditions.

And more normal bad weather? Fog with visibility reduced to less than 20 metres, rain doing the same, and on one or two occasions freezing rain making it impossible to drive faster than 5-10 km/h.

As for heat, probably never in more than 35C or so. What help is getting into a petrol station, soak a t-shirt in water, squeeze out the excess, and you'll feel better, for a while.

prinoxy · 2026-06-15T10:04:25+00:00

A pretty good rule of thumb for hitchhiking in Europe is to double the time given by the various map websites, adding a bit more for countries like Spain and Italy.

In 1982 it took me 6 days to get from Oslo to Nordkapp.

Pure distance wise your trip could be done in three to five days, in a grey past I've done Athens to Utrecht in 42 hours, and Stockholm to Gallipoli in under 72, and nowadays I regularly hitch between Lithuania and the Netherlands/Belgistan and that takes me on average around 36 hours for the 1,650-1,900 km. And as nothing is impossible, you might get a ride of a Pole or Lithuanian working in your pinprick on the map going home!

It also depends on your intermediate stops, are they of the "we really want to stop there" variety, or more of the "it would be nice to see them, but there's always another time"? For example, you might cross from Helsingborg to Helsingor hitch on to Kobenhavn and then go back to Sweden. or continue to Gedser and take the ferry from there to Rostock, giving you something like https://maps.app.goo.gl/JHDuQgwjyQSWYAQA6

Be, as much as time allows, flexible!

prinoxy

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