Would you still travel to the countryside near Toulouse amid wildfires?

[Lagirl20]

Would you go on holiday to the countryside near Toulouse at the moment? Wildfires are causing us concern, considering cancelling our trip, due to depart in a couple of days

What have you been hearing?

FWIW we live in that part of the world, are very rural, and have no plans on moving/evacuating.

There have been one or two relatively small fires in the Toulouse area ans the official risk level has been raised in places but AFAIK most of the major fires have been way out to the east...in the Aude and the Pyrennees-Oriental..

Good to hear from someone in the region, thanks for your comment. Will be staying just two of us in Villeneuve-sur-Lot. Then travelling west to Bordeaux and beyond. Reading reports of wildfires in the area, and Bordeaux and two fire fighters sadly died. Worried about risk of fires, evacuations etc

I know Bordeaux area has had problems over the last few days, nothing much round us but everywhere is dry as heck..

Hope all goes OK for you.

you can monitor fires live on this tool

and see how near it might be and which direction it could be developing in

For info there are serious problems right now (Thursday Noon) with a big scrub and forest fire to the west of Bordeaux ...( just outside Lege-Cap-Ferret)

Unconfirmed reports of up to 20,000 locals and holiday makers being evacuated.

Crikey it looks awful right now.

We're also due to travel to SW France in a few weeks, to Atlantic Coast and pyranees, and feeling quite nervous.

Would your insurance cover cancellation though? I assume flights would have to be cancelled and areas advised against travel to be able to cancel?

If we could cancel I would, mainly as it looks too hot and uncomfortable for us. As it is we'll have to go as it would be such a waste of money.

Thanks to pp for the link to follow the fires.

Yes unfortunately it's got worse overnight and there's a mess evacuation going at Cap Ferret this AM (including some getting off by boat) and there's now a big outbreak further south near Biscarrosse.

I'd want to know a few specifics before deciding, and they matter more for a neurodivergent family than most.
First: is your destination affected, or is it the wider region? Wildfires move fast, and the news tends to paint with a broad brush. Ring the accommodation and ask them: "Are you operating normally? Are there evacuation plans? How's the air quality where you are right now?" Their answer matters far more than the headlines.
Second: if smoke, that's a real sensory factor. Smoke can trigger meltdowns or anxiety that aren't obvious until you're there respiratory sensitivity, the smell, the haze affecting routines. If your child is sensitive to air quality or unpredictability, that's a reason to reconsider, even if the danger itself is low.
Third: a couple of days out, you're also juggling cancellation costs, rebooking stress, and the disappointment cascade. That's exhausting for neurodivergent families. So the maths is: real risk vs sensory impact vs disruption to your routine.
If you do go: pack extra masks (even if you don't normally), have a Plan B, and give yourself permission to bail early if the air gets bad. If you cancel: don't feel bad about it, the uncertain trip beats a calm break at home every time.
Ring them and see what they say once you know you know.
(I plan travel for neurodivergent families, and I'm neurodivergent myself with a son who is autistic.)

I would research seriously WHERE exactly you are going.

The last thing the emergency teams need is unnecessary tourists.

If you are nowhere near the area, the whole country is not at a standstill, no reason to cancel

Papers reported that there was more than 200 new fires in one weekend, the continent is dry as a bone, it doesn't take much sadly

For.info;

Looking at French domestic rolling news the situation is pretty/very grim for the areas west of Bordeaux (specifically Le Cap Ferret ) and also south west (Biscarrosse).....there are mass evacuations in progress by boat from Le Cap F and by one main road from both.

For anyone thinking of travelling to the area I'd stongly recommend trying to keep an.eye on French MSM (e.g. BFM,.Crews or LCI).

In the context of the thread I.maybe should emphasise this area is two hours plus plus drive west of Toulouse.

We are due to travel to SW France next week, to Hendaye, and feeling quite worried about the whole situation. It’s 1.5 / 2 hours drive from where the fires are at the moment but it seems to be changing very quickly.

Have the fires near Perpignan been put out now? Do you think they will reignite?

Can we get AI answers banned on here?

You must not know that AI mimics ND communication styles because it’s mostly ND people writing the algorithms teaching AI how to communicate. Please don’t think you can tell the difference between the two, that is breathtakingly arrogant.

It’s obviously AI. ND people didn’t write like this until Chat GPT turned up. I didn’t need to run it through an AI checker, but I did just for you:

Based on a stylistic and structural analysis, yes, this text was highly likely written by an AI (or heavily assisted by one). While it displays excellent empathy and understanding of neurodivergent needs, several distinct linguistic markers give away its machine origins. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Here is the breakdown of why this text flags as AI-generated:

1. Structural Predictability

• The "First, Second, Third" Blueprint: AI models love to organize advice into neat, numbered, or sequential lists.
• The Formulaic Conclusion: The text wraps up with a perfectly symmetrical "If you do go / If you cancel" parallel structure, followed by a punchy, neat concluding sentence. 1]

1. Tell-Tale AI Vocabulary

• "Disappointment cascade": This is a classic AI-ism. While evocative, human writers rarely pair these two words naturally in casual advice.
• "Sensory factor" and "Sensory impact": The repetition of these terms in close proximity reflects how AI optimizes for a prompt's keywords (likely "neurodivergent" and "wildfires").
• "The maths is...": AI frequently uses this exact metaphorical transition to summarize a complex decision-making process.

1. Syntax and Punctuation Patterns

• The Colon Drop: The text relies heavily on colons to introduce lists or explanations ("First: is your destination...", "Second: if smoke...", "Third: a couple of days...", "So the maths is..."). Humans usually vary their sentence structures more naturally. 1]
• Grammatical Glitches: Look at the phrase: "...until you're there respiratory sensitivity, the smell, the haze..." There is a missing preposition or punctuation mark before "respiratory." AI often experiences slight grammatical clipping when trying to cram too many thematic keywords into a single sentence.

1. Tone Over-Optimization

• Hyper-Calculated Empathy: The text perfectly mimics a supportive peer, but it reads almost tooefficiently. It hits every single expected checkbox for neurodivergent care (routines, sensory issues, meltdowns, anxiety) in a highly condensed, rapid-fire format without any personal anecdotes or conversational filler. 1]

And there aren’t lots of autistic people sitting teaching LLM how to write. LLM learn by reading text from all over the internet, books, articles etc. It still doesn’t sound human.

I know the ‘signs’ thank you very much and I also know the AI checkers are utter crap. ChatGPT and other AI mimics ND communication styles, not the other way around can’t understand why you put the cart before the horse there.

It is not obvious because there is no accurate way to tell, and I’m sick of people pretending they can tell.

I Work in AI. This is utter rubbish. For a start no one is ‘writing algorithms teaching AI how to communicate’. Transformers are not programmed in the conventional sense - no one writes an algorithm. The algorithms that drive them, such as they are, are emergent from the training process and are unknown (and effectively unknowable, unless you fancy writing out a polynomial with several billion terms).

Secondly the idea that everyone working in computing research is ND is very much an outdated view, if it was ever true.

I didn’t say AI was all done by supervised machine learning. Regardless of whether it is supervised or unsupervised machine learning, the AI (machine) is still learning the way it was coded to either supervised by humans or based off data sets the coder directs it to. Neither type of machine learning is objective and often embeds the preferences of the coder, the majority of whom are ND.

I didn’t say it had anything to do with ND communication styles. That was you. What I said was that if it was supposedly an ND style of writing, how come we have only seen this jarring writing style in the last couple of years? Why didn’t people write like that previously?

Again, LLM are not taught by a group of people. They learn by ‘reading’ huge amounts of text from books, articles and online content. Did you look at the specific issues raised with that post’s content?

Well since you can’t even understand what I’m writing, I doubt you work in AI beyond a bit of project management.

Secondly, I did not say everyone, I said the majority. And when we have a majority it influences output.

Because it is a MIMIC. Christ.

Again, I didn’t say they were being taught by a large group of people. Honestly, you don’t know what a mimic is vs the real deal and now you don’t even know the basics of supervised vs unsupervised machine learning such that you have imagined some sort of teacher-student scenario because I used the word learning.

And you work on AI. Yeah pull the other one.

WTH does the OP mention being ND?!

Ffs I put Curiosity on Mars and now people online are arguing with me that when an AI tells them it thinks another AI might have written something, they believe it 100%. Even knowing all the issues AI has with accuracy on even basic objective facts like where and when was this photo taken much less something as subtle as was this written by AI, with help of AI or no AI?

It has nothing to do with the OP. It’s the post from an ND person.
Likely posting their pov as to whether they would go with the fires as an ND person.

But like half the posts on mumsnet these days by a self identifying ND person, someone random decides it’s written by AI and tries to get their posts deleted and them banned. I am sick of it.