The Ace is a few blocks from Seattle’s landmark Pike Place Market, which runs adjacent to the water and offers some scenic vantage points over Elliot Bay. The country’s oldest farmers’ market is a great place for a quick meal, or to watch the Seattle tradition of fish throwing, where your fresh salmon is chucked from the ice to the fishmonger.

Such historic practices feel quaint compared to the city’s current status as a burgeoning technopolis, home to Microsoft, countless start-ups and Amazon’s sprawling downtown HQ complete with The Spheres – three plant-filled glass pods functioning as indoor gardens-cum-offices. Visitors can enjoy a guided tour of these offices, if you can call them that, which house more than 400 different species of cloud forest plants from all over the world.

Many tech billionaires, including Bill and Melinda Gates, live in nearby Medina which is connected to Seattle by bridge – their combined worth reaching into the tens of billions of dollars and their impact on the local economy felt throughout the city.

Seattle was originally a frontier town, settled in 1851 (though Native American tribes had lived there much longer) and it became the forefront of the lumber industry. The University of Washington describes the idea of a "frontier" as "an edge between the known and the unknown, the settled and the wild… a frontier is where you are on your own, where the rules are not yet made." This frontier spirit certainly survives in the city, from the innovative Space Needle built for the 1962 World’s Fair to the establishment of the Boeing factory in 1966 and its pivotal role in the space race, through to today where the chilled out, legal pot-smoking vibe (Washington became the first US state to legalise recreational use of marijuana) belies frenetic advancements in tech.

Visit the clutch of Amazon Go shops where your groceries are automatically charged to your Amazon account – no cash desks needed – for a vision of the future of retail.

In 1869, a fire ravaged the city, burning much of it to the ground – the entire business district was destroyed and new infrastructure was built on top. As a result, there’s a great subterranean tour that leads you through entombed streets and shopfronts. I wonder if in another few hundred years, after an equivalently catastrophic digital crash, tourists will be taken through the abandoned Amazon office complex in the same way.

But it’s hard to be dystopian when Seattle is just so upbeat. Not in an annoying or fake Hollywood way though, but in a pinball and picklebacks at 4pm on a Thursday kind of way. The pinball museum is the most fun you can have – as an adult or child; try your thumbs at retro games like Buckaroo. And a pickleback, for the uninitiated, is a shot of whiskey and a shot of pickle brine. Delicious? Who cares!

Every other shop in Seattle seems to cater to a rugged, adventurous life. With Mount Rainier and the Cascades close by, skiing and hiking are how locals spend their weekends. The closest I got to nature was a cycle on a Lime electric bike (download the app and pick one up wherever you spot one – there are thousands) around Olympic Sculpture Park, downtown Seattle’s largest green space, which zigzags from the pavilion to the water’s edge. There’s even a tiny rocky beach.