This actually happened to me last summer.
I was supposed to fly out to Arizona from California at about 5PM, and we decided the night before that I and two of my friends would go skydiving. The cheapest and nearest place was about 150 miles north, so we decided to make the trip because it'd be a fun experience.
We got there just fine. Left at 10:00 in the morning and made it in less than 2 hours. We went skydiving, and all was well.
I believe it was around 1:30 when we left from there. We traveled barely 200 yards when my friend tried to turn the steering wheel and said, "Bilal the steering just got really stiff." I thought it might have been nothing so I told him to drive around a little bit more to see if it goes away. It didn't. We pulled over to the side of the road- LITERALLY about 20 miles away from the nearest town. Here's what had happened:
The crank pulley had blown off, knocking cutting the power steering line, knocking out the fan belt pulley, and almost sheered of all the fan belt. Obviously we couldn't turn the car back on again, let alone even move it.
In the end, we all had our cell phones and we'd gotten a tow truck there within about 45 minutes- not bad if you think where we were. A nice farmer had noticed us and tried to help us out, but even he couldn't do anything. The car was towed to the nearest Honda dealership, about 15 miles away.
How'd we get home? We called a friend who drove 150 miles up, and then drove us back down. He'd wanted to go with us skydiving in the first place, but decided not to at the last minute- THANK GOD!
If we'd have had no cell phones, we'd have probably been stuck there for hours without a call out to anyone. And we wouldn't have been home till the next day.
PS- I missed my flight