Seattle, the Dreamliner city favoured by Hollywood and home of mighty Boeing

Seattle had something of a bad-boy rock 'n' roll reputation long before native grunge rocker Kurt Cobain cemented the city's place in music legend.
On their iconic Fillmore East - June 1971 album the Mothers of Invention sang about a rock 'n' roll band called Vanilla Fudge and a Seattle motel called the Edgewater Inn (it's not a track you're likely to hear on the Terry Wogan show).
I was surprised to see that the hotel is still going strong: when we drove past, the taxi driver pointed it out. 'That's where The Beatles stayed,' he proudly announced.

Reach for the sky: The Space Needle dominates the Seattle skyline

These days, it's hard to avoid this city in America's Pacific North-West. It keeps cropping up in all sorts of places.
Long after its celebrated brush with cinematic glory in Sleepless In Seattle, it has become a constant favourite as a movie location. It is the setting, for example, of the new Jennifer Aniston film Love Happens.
On TV, it features on BBC3's new slasher drama Harper's Island and it was also here they filmed teen favourite Robert Pattinson in the vampire movie Twilight.
Seattle is also famously the home of Bill Gates and Microsoft, the starting point of the ubiquitous coffee chain Starbucks and - more of this later - the location for the world's biggest aircraft manufacturer, Boeing.
Seattle is like no other American city. After the quick journey into town from the airport, you find yourself in a place that seems very familiar.
I wondered whether this is because I have spent too much time watching endless reruns of the Seattle-based sitcom Frasier (though the locals are quick to tell you - rather bitterly - that not a second of the programme was ever actually filmed here).
The distinctive Space Needle, which features in the programme's animated credits (along with the disappointingly truncated monorail), no doubt help to foster that familiarity.
Perhaps the fact that the city is just a couple of hours' drive from Canada explains the unexpectedly laid-back charm of the place.

Soaring ambitions: 787 Dreamliners taking shape inside Boeing's massive workshop in Everett, outside Seattle

Unlike most US cities, Seattle is definitely somewhere that you can enjoy on foot - many of the main museums and other sights are within easy walking distance of the city-centre hotels. If you don't feel like walking, there is free public transport in the downtown area (free public transport in the US - who would have thought it!).
A recurring joke on Frasier is that, like Manchester, Seattle is much rained upon ('It rains nine months of the year,' a character says in Sleepless In Seattle).
The city is quick to dispute this. They produce statistics that show it rains less here than in New York or Washington DC. Actually, perhaps it is the British-style climate that helps to make the place feel so much like home.
Seattle's significant place in rock 'n' roll history - this was the home of not only Kurt Cobain but also Jimi Hendrix - attracts legions of musical pilgrims. The city's Experience Music Project, located at the foot of the Space Needle, is named in honour of Jimi and contains a huge range of memorabilia and video recordings of him performing 40 years ago.
Experience's most popular exhibit at the moment is the glove Michael Jackson wore when he first performed his 'moonwalk' during a TV special for Motown's 25th anniversary.

Actress is starring in Love Happens, set in Seattle

But you can't go far in Seattle without encountering Boeing. Its construction plants straggle from the north of the city to the south.
The aircraft-building process is so extraordinary that it is not surprising that a tour of the main factory has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the American North West.
Can you imagine a building big enough to house a Boeing 747? Can you imagine a building that can comfortably accommodate dozens and dozens of them?
The Boeing aircraft plant in Everett, about 40 minutes' drive north of Seattle, must be one of those places like the Great Wall of China that you can pick out from space (from your Boeing spacecraft).
Standing next to the main factory building - the world's most voluminous structure, big enough to house the whole of Disneyland - you feel like an ant in the shadow of an elephant.
You start out wondering how it can be possible to construct such a monstrous building (with doors the size of football fields).
Then, once you step inside the doors, you are confronted by massive aircraft in various stages of completion on the Boeing production line: orderly processions of 747s, 777s, 767s and - the latest addition - the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
I had been invited to the Boeing plant to look at the new 787, which is due to begin UK operations in two years with Thomson Airways.
Airbus took the view that there was a need for an even bigger plane than the 747 for transporting large numbers of passengers between major cities and so built the super-jumbo A380.
Boeing decided that what airlines really wanted was a mid-sized, wide-body, twin-engine jet plane that, due to much improved fuel efficiency and light bodyweight, could fly much further distances - London to Honolulu, for example - so opening a wide array of new destinations to the package-holiday market.