What surprised me most of all was the generosity of complete strangers; none of them had to stop and pick us up, but they all did. While the "success rate" of hitchhiking is less than one car per hundred, all it takes is one person to make your day. As I looked into the windows of the numerous passing cars, the people I expected to stop never did and the people I never thought would give us the time of day went out of their way to help us reach our destination.
The biggest terrors I encountered on this trip was that I never knew exactly where we were, where our next ride would come from, or if this was the gas station we'd be stranded in for the night. While the feeling didn't seem to faze Artyom, every time we stepped out of a car into a random gas station in the middle of nowhere I became surprisingly uncomfortable. I pride myself on not planning, but this was a new extreme for me. Without fail, someone always picked us up, but the repeated anxiety I experienced standing at the exit of a random gas station not knowing what is going to happen from one hour to the next is something I've never encountered before. I desperately wanted to know where the hell we were going, but after a while, I learned to just let go and trusted that at some point someone would take us somewhere closer to our final destination.
The who, what, when, where, why, and how were of little importance - because they were all unknown to us.