I'm leaving out a ton of detail here and more than this one event happened. I was helping a friend move from California to Jersey. I live in NJ so I flew out there. We took my friends Toyota 4 Runner, which we packed with everything he owned, and drove back East. About 90 miles outside of Vegas the engine blew a rod. This was in 1996-7 so neither one of us had a cell phone. We were stranded in the desert. We eventually found our way (there's another story here of coarse) to Seligman Arizona. There is only one road that goes through it. Population of 500 people or so. We were stuck there for a few weeks while trying to get his ditched car with everything he owned towed in and also trying to find a new engine for it. This is also an extremely short summery. Skipping the hitchhiking, roach motel, getting screwed by the mechanic, trying to scrounge money to pay for everything, people we met, wondering the desert, $532 short term parking ticket, dead battery and caught between 8 merging lanes, cracked radiator that could only hold 10 minutes of water, running tolls, crushing the roof luggage rack, a second exploding engine, trying to get my shifts covered at work so I would have a job when I got back.... And of coarse the good stuff like the people we met, places we saw, and the memories made. So much more happened on that trip. Some good some bad. It was like in a movie where when the characters finally make it back home they are different people from when they started.