Somewhere I've got a very funny quote in French about someone who went the 80 miles north from Nyons to Valence (well south of Lyon) for the first time, when they were a child, and encountering fog. From the description from the perspective of a child, it was like they had ventured to the North Pole.
Found it, and here's a translation via DeepL
René Barjavel, recalling his childhood in Nyons, says:
“My father had business in Valence, and he decided to take me along. It was the big city, and the place where ‘the north’ began—the gateway to the land of the savages, heading toward the North Pole. (...) We stayed at a hotel I have no memory of, but the next morning, as we were leaving, I saw in the middle of the small square, on a lawn, a sort of diaphanous arabesque that was slowly unfurling, like the gauze scarf of a little girl playing bride. I exclaimed, “Oh, Dad, look, the grass is smoking!” .. My father burst out laughing. “That’s not smoke,” he said. Then he grew serious again, and in a dramatic voice added, “That’s fog.” Such was my first encounter with the lands beyond the sun—lands where the sky is gray, where people go out onto the street even when it’s raining, and where you get your feet wet without dying from it. ” (R. Barjavel, *La charrette bleue*, Denon 1980, pp. 169–170).