Back when I was nineteen I was hitchhiking across the US and got kicked out of a car at gunpoint on a tiny road somewhere in the Mojave desert. I got rescued about 30 hours later by the first guy who drove by. I was unconscious from dehydration and had a bit of a sunburn.

About the only thing I did was hide from the sun as much as possible during the day and walk slowly at night back along the road in hopes of reaching a larger road. Didn't really help as the guy who found me came from the direction I was walking anyway but of course I didn't know that at the time. I didn't have any water and wasn't really prepared in any way. So I really have nothing useful to say except being thirsty is not fun and somewhere out there is a pipefitter that makes me hope heaven exists so he can go there, because man, if not for him, I'd be a nice bleached set of bones!

I guess the only thing you can take from my experience is this: just because you expect to have a vehicle doesn't mean you will. It might break down, it might run out of fuel, or the driver may be nuts. So take whatever you need to do a good but of walking, and don't go traveling places you couldn't navigate if you needed to. When I got left, I didn't know where I was, and what the road went to, so I didn't know if there would be a town five miles down the road and I should continue in the direction of the car, or if it was a dead end, and I should head back, like I did, or what.

Anyway it turned out that there wasn't anything at the end of the road but a played-out oil well of some sort and the pipefitter had been shutting it down or taking some equipment or that sort of thing. Pure fluke he was there at all. So I guess the other lesson is that you should always be phenomenally lucky.