That sounds like incredibly poor planning on your part and a series of bad decisions.

Vacationing in wildfire regions during wildfire season.

You let your fuel tank get low without knowing when or where your next fillup would be.

You didn't have hotel reservations in advance.

You waited until nightfall to find a room.

You're relying on a smartphone for navigation.

You didn't make offline maps of the whole region on everyone's devices. All of California is only around 2gb in Google Maps. That functionality has existied for a decade.

Along with all of the above, AAA still has free paper maps. If you're traveling anywhere outside the major cities, always bring a paper map with you. It doesn't need to be your primary method of navigation, but when your phone battery is dying, or your navigation app refuses to load because of spotty signal, the paper map will still work.

That's an excellent suggestion, especially if you're trying to disconnect and go electronics free. Sadly a lot of people can't even read a map anymore.

Until you mentioned, I didn't even consider that someone might actually have trouble with reading a paper map. I guess these days with location services on your phone, you never need to really find where you are in the first place. You just tap the button to zoom to your location, and go from there.

I don't like the navigation feature in most Apps because I like to know my next couple moves. Google Maps has a tendency to tell you "turn now" or "turn back there".

I have discovered by driving with others as navigators, that a lot of people cannot read a map and are literally just doing what the App says.

If you miss a turn, people are incapable of looking at the map and saying "go one more block and take a left to get back on course". They have to wait for a reroute.

You know, we had a road trip in California, not only in that problematic part of it where the fire developed while being on the road (2 days out of 13). Which forced us dropping previous plans, revising plans due to parts of our destinations became unreachable. And the alternates becoming occupied making us searching for new accommodation extended beyond nightfall and destinations anticipated. The rest is on us, yes, not buying our own offline navigation just for this trip intending to use the one from car rental assuming they provide one that is adequate for the area they operate in. Or not spending extended time on building up the offline map to the desired resolution for much more than we intended to go to. Well, we knew about the blind spots but planed for it except the consequences of the newly developed wildfire.

Probably next time you should only express opinion in topics you not only see from the idealistic viewpoint of an outsider.

Or simply not deviate from the topic of bad cell coverage just to criticize someone in something you cannot comprehend fully.