Ride 7,000 was rather unremarkable, 3.8 km in 4 minutes with a woman and her little dog, ending on the big Jakai roundabout at Klaipēda. Day itself was slightly more remarkable, third 1,000+ km of the year just in Lithuania.
I got this ride, yes that's a Gurgle short-URL. When I pasted it, and saw where it ended, I immediately remembered the driver, a Turkish guy, who, upon finding out that I was a programmer, asked me what it would take to reprogram slot-machines to screw the players even more.
Am I really a freak?
As for the why of looking at it? I'm in the process of de-Gurgle-ing my data, replacing Gurgle-traces with Valhalla traces.
Slowdown are not significant, many, if not most, drivers pay little attention to the 70/90 km/h speed limits, except for the speed-camera monitored Vievis to Elektrėnai section. Obviously, if accidents happen, like on Friday 31 July on the Vievis to Elektrėnai section, delays will be really long!
3 August 2026, a little trip from Palanga to Palanga, via Vilnius, Klaipēda and Vilnius.
1,212.0 km, longest calendar day for 2026, second longest single day for Lithuania, sadly lost too much time walking between rides to go for another 140 km to break my LT record.
Another 12?
12 rides.
One more 12?
Average wait 0:12(:11).
And one more 12?
12 rides to go to 7,000 recorded rides.
The highest Q, 141,245, since July 2019, and never more on an unconnected day!
Just 145,117.7 km to go to my first (ha, ha, ha) 1,000,000 km, and a mere 13,874.2 for 50,000 km for the year.
But enough numbers, I had fun!
As you know, or not, there are seven capitals in Europe that start with the letter "B", or eight if you want to include Baku. Now I've never done this, but it's been popping up in my mind since, well quite a long time…
How about hitching past all of them, and do it in either the normal way, i.e.
Or do something a bit more challenging, do it in the, as far as I can make out, but please correct me if I'm wrong, longest way, i.e.
Of course someone could add this, or just "Visit all European capitals starting with the letter "B"", to the "You're a real hitchhiker if you've done…" posts that appeared in this subreddit a few years ago.
Maybe you've seen the post of this entity:
>Hey I’m gonna be hitchhiking France starting tomorrow and just wondering if you had any insight for the central/west region. I don’t really have a plan but I basically wanna go around France for nine days. I was even thinking about the east/alps or something. Anyways take care man
It was followed by a chat request, that contained the above. My reply to this entity was:
>You made more than 8,270 posts since joining reddit on 26 March (real number right now: 8,276, reddit leaks data), what have you got to hide?
And within minutes the original post was deleted!
Think about it for a moment, 8,276 posts in just four months, that's more than 2,000 per month, or over 60 per day. If this entity has also contacted you, I'd strongly suggest you delete the request, and block it!
A real person? My arse!
Right now there are absolutely shitloads of roadworks everywhere, so before you set off, make sure that you're not dropped off at a section where one lane of the opposite side is routed along two lanes of the current site. If this is the case, it;s impossible to stop for ant traffic, and you might find yourself at an exit where about one car per a long time rejoins the A1, and it may not be interested in picking you up. I've had a look at Gurgle Maps, Valhalla, and GraphHopper, and they don't really show anything, but Waze might be of use, in cars it does show the issues!
This past Thursday, getting back onto the A1 towards Kaunas/Klaipėda was basically impossible at the Elektrėnai and Kėdainiai exits. The sliproads at Petrasiunai and the petrol station some 500 or so metres further are usable again.
There's also supposed to be info on https://vialietuva.lt/, but I've been unable to find anything on the English version.
I've got a simple RTF file that uses one single font, "Courier New". Yet when I save it in RTF format the font table contains an entry for every (>1,000) font on my system. Is there any way to prevent this?
Just before the 1 July/3 eur China surcharge I decided to buy a few more of my favourite animals, and given my waiting times here in Lithuania, lots of people also seem to like them. ;)
…but today I finally got my second ride with a female truck-driver!
Happy bunny!
…and I've already covered 30,000+ km. had, after only 15 buses in the past 46 years, four rides in buses this year, broke my rolling 365-day max distance five times, finally wrote another entry for my blog, URL will follow soon, clocked up a sixth ride with this time someone rather more than a local celebrity, Neli Beliakaite, who also took me over 8,000 hours of driving time.
And yesterday was one of those days, pissing down at my get-up-to-hitch time of 4:10, so I decided to stay in bed, for what turned out a perfectly good day to hit the road, and had to hone my plumbing skills to move a real fatberg from our kitchen drain. But at least I will hit the road again tomorrow. ;)
I've temporarily put up "eloc.txt", containing a table of waiting times for all locations for which I have the exact coordinates. You can import it into a spreadsheet as a CSV file, if you use the "|" (vertical bar) as a separator, rather than the "," (comma), and then you can play with it to your heart's content. Note that you need a UTF-8 aware editor to display it neatly aligned in columns.
My programs limit themselves to producing only Top-50 tables, but contain conditional define "{!define topzillion}" (change the "!" to a "$") to get out this table. The programs also only include locations with at least 10 waits, I consider fewer waits of no real statistical value, again this can be changed by editing the source and recompiling.
I've just about beaten my self-imposed bi-annual update deadline of 30 June for my hitchhiking statistic programs, which you can find on Prino’s “technical” hitchhiking resources, with a manual of sorts on the "A manual for Prino’s hitchhiking programs" page.
The, at long, long, long last, major change is the production of a new output file, "eloc.h-h" with information about waiting times for locations for which I have the "exact" coordinates. To make them (somewhat) statistically relevant, I've only included locations, at least in the first three top-50 tables, where I've had at least 10 waiting departures, and that means that you won't find the location that tops the fourth table with an "impressive" average wait of just 0:14 in them, despite having stood there 172 times. You'll also see that there are two locations with the same name, "Gariūnai", the first of them refers to the "post-kebab" location, the second to the "pre-kebab" location, about 200 metres further. Not wanting to miss the deadline, it means I still need to apply some polish and some of the code is still in Pascal rather than more efficient assembler.
It's likely that I will also, at some stage, produce a CSV file that can, for those skilled in the art of spreadsheets, produce more info.
And finally, I'm unlikely to produce anything in the "hitchhiking-data-standard" format. I've looked into it but for me it's just too unwieldy, although using REXX (if you're now going to tell me to use Python or even Perl, I will not speak to you again), rather than Pascal or PL/I (same here, don't mention C, C++, or burn in hell, Rust) it might not be too hard to convert my later data, where I have Valhalla traces, into this "hitchhiking-data-standard" format.
The A13 at the exit of Palanga? I've stood there, +55.9045213,+021.1051011, 63 times, had 38 recorded waits, and my average recorded wait was just 0:06.
If you really are going to hitchhike in the current heatwave, carry at least two litres of water, and take an umbrella to give yourself some shade. If at all possible, hitch from petrolstation/service area to the next so that you can take shelter!
Second ride from the first driver today, he even remembered the other funny t-shirt I was wearing when he picked me up the last time, almost eight months ago, and another "You made my day!", from the fourth driver, who had left Vilnius in a bad mood. And a new longest ride in an EV with a make driver. Six hours and 25 minutes to go for my 8,000 hours of driving time.
It's a FAQ, and for Europe a pretty good rule of thumb is to double the time calculated by the likes of Valhalla, GraphHopper, or their commercial equivalents. But how accurate is this figure?
Well, given that I've tracked most of my rides, here are my figures, from 16 June 1980 to 19 June 2026:
Rides: 6,908
Days on the road: 1,212
Hitched distance: 847,069.5 km in a driving time of 7,988 hours and 41 minutes.
As for my time on the road, so from the moment I get into the first car of the day, I do not record waiting times before the first ride of the day, unless I actually continue hitching after midnight, its 14,870 hours and 41 minutes. The difference is made up by:
A total waiting time of 4036:16
All in-ride stops (petrol, meals, toilet, etc) totalling 918:46
In ride sleeping time of 149:09 (sleep during a ride, not passing midnight)
Out-ride sleeping time of 144:30 (sleep from before to after midnight during a ride)
Time-zone crossings -9:00 (in other words I've gone to the east without ever going back to the west by thumb)
Idle time between rides, such as walking from an impossible to hitch spot to a better one, visiting something interesting on the way, or something mundane as having a bite between rides 1775:49
As to why the driving time plus all other times (minus the out-ride sleeping time, and time-zone crossings) do not add up to the total on-the-road time, there's a difference of 13:30, I haven't got a clue, but having only just put all data into a spreadsheet, figuring it out will be something that needs addressing!
So to return to the title of this post, a total driving time of nearly 8,000 hours, combined with a total on-the-road time of nearly 15,000 hours seems to make a pretty good case for the "double-the-time" rule of thumb! At least for me, someone who's been hitchhiking as a single male for probably 99% of his rides!
To the next "milestone", 8,000 hours of actual driving time while hitchhiking. 😀