Seattle

Farmers opened it in 1907 to sell direct, cutting the middlemen out. One fish stall throws each order over the counter, and people stop to watch that. The market drops several levels down the hill, and those lower lanes hold the old small shops.

The tower went up for the 1962 world's fair as somebody's drawing of the future. A 2018 rebuild replaced the lower floor with glass and set it turning, so the structure and the ground slide past under your feet. Upstairs the cage gave way to glass walls.

Cars and foot passengers ride together from the downtown dock on a crossing of about thirty-five minutes. Walk-on fares are collected outbound only and the return boat takes no ticket, so riding over and straight back costs one fare.

The towers and pipework of a coal gasification plant were left standing when the site became a park in 1975. The mound facing the lake is capped ground, and the wind that crosses it is why people come here to fly kites.

After the fire of 1889 the streets were relaid one storey higher. That sealed the old ground floors under the new pavement, and they are still down there. A guide takes you down to walk past those shopfronts, on floors uneven enough to want flat shoes.

An old army post became the largest park in the city, and its officers' houses still stand among the trees. The West Point Lighthouse sits under the bluff, so the walk out is downhill and the walk back is the hard half.

Salt water and the freshwater lake sit at different heights, so boats enter a chamber to be floated up or dropped down. A stepped channel runs alongside for salmon working upstream. Windows in that channel let you watch the fish pass at eye level from below.

A narrow shelf cut into the hillside, where a few paces of railing account for most of the photographs ever taken of this city.

Under the bridge a concrete giant grips a real Volkswagen Beetle in one hand. The neighbourhood commissioned it by competition in 1990, and so many people climb it that the hand and the nose have worn smooth.

The folded glass and steel building opened in 2004. Inside, the stacks do not stop at each floor but climb a gentle ramp through four of them, so the call numbers never break. Each level takes a different colour, and the wall tells you where you are.

Opened in 2012 right beside the Space Needle and given over wholly to the Tacoma-born glass artist Dale Chihuly. Red and yellow glass blooms hang in a long run beneath the glasshouse roof, and at sunset lights come up on the glass forms in the garden outside.

Frank Gehry's building, like crumpled sheets of metal pressed together, opened in 2000. The monorail track pierces the building's core, and the displays revolve around two Seattle names, Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana.

Over two hours' drive southeast of Seattle stands Rainier, a volcano under permanent snow. Wildflowers carpet the Paradise meadows in July and August. From town the peak shows only on clear days, which locals greet with the phrase the mountain is out.

A waterfront sculpture park the Seattle Art Museum opened in 2007, and it charges nothing to enter. The path zigzags in a Z over the railway and the road down to the edge of Elliott Bay, and the red steel Eagle is by Alexander Calder.

An 82 metre waterfall in the foothills east of Seattle. It appeared in the opening of Twin Peaks, and the lodge hotel perched on the cliff above is still there. Only a short stroll separates the lookout from the parking lot.

An aviation museum alongside the Boeing Field runway. It keeps the red wooden barn where Boeing first built aircraft, and across a footbridge the outdoor gallery lets you stroll down the aisles of a Concorde and a former presidential jet.