Seattle turnaround days & looking for Kurt Cobain's house

I was really excited about our turnaround port for the season being Seattle as I was a full on grunge phase in my late teens and Seattle was the home of grunge music and Jimi Hendrix, our only issue was that we docked on sundays every week and had to be back onboard around 2pm and nothing if note really opened early on unless you just wanted to get breakfast near the Farmers market.

Still being in the city of grunge (and a little bit naive) we jumped in a cab one day and told our bemused looking driver to take us to Kurt Cobains house! He gave us the look we deserved and mumbled something under his breath and off we went, now if we'd acutally thought this through we would have known to instead go to the Cobain memorial park in Aberdeen but eventually our driver stopped and said 'there you go'

I honestly don't know what we were thinking as it was now 2010 and sixteen years after Cobain passed away so of course the house was no longer a ghoulish tourist site and of course had been put back on the market, sold and was just a regular house now! Then our helpful driver said 'you should have gone to the memorial park instead' Great, bloody helpful after we'd spent the time to get to the house and with little time left we had to head back to the ship.

What was cool walking around Seattle was seeing all the gig posters for some of the classic grunge bands like Green River & The Melvins posted around, of course we'd never get the chance to go to a gig as we'd always be sailing each night! Our next time in Seattle was our trip to the iconic Space Needle landmark (well known from the opening of Fraiser)

How crazy is it that in the States you literally have to put a sign for a tourist attraction telling people they can't bring guns to it!? I know America loves its guns but wow, having to spell it out to people who thought they could is just insane to me!

The problems with turnaround in Seattle was that we always docked on a Sunday morning and nothing was really open until 11am because it was a Sunday, other than restaurants if you wanted breakfast. Also getting out of the port area and into the city proper took some doing, option 1 was queuing and then fighting the Fillipino mafia for the crew shuttle bus but the queing system would go out of the window once the bus arrived and it was every person for themselves. Not great scenes to be seen by the guests as they are disembarking the crew literally fighting to get on a bus, the problem was it was a good 30 minute drive into the city centre from the port area and time was limited as always on turnaround days.

Once I saw a drummer from one of the ships bands almost knockout another crew member who was trying to push his way through the queue onto the bus! The other option which was just as hit and miss but at least a bit more civilised was trying to get a cab and as normal we'd try and split the cost between 3 or 4 of us. But again even this wasn't simple, firstly most cabs didn't want to take you! This was because they all wanted the higher fares to take disembarking passengers to the airport, and not forgetting that even once we were off the ship in our own free time we still in port areas had to let the passengers take the available cabs before we did.

This meant more often than not in Seattle getting ashore for even a few hours on turnaround day proved to be an absolute bollock-ache and as we would soon discover the previous night/last night of the cruise was a late sail from Victoria, Canada every Saturday night where we docked around 4pm and sailed at midnight, which meant suddenly none of us were too fussed about getting ashore on Sunday as we'd usually be quite happy to sleep off our epic last night of the cruise hangovers!