Oakland Park residents Jim and Chris Guld are about to sell their home and travel around the world, living full-time aboard a cruise ship called Villa Vie Odyssey.
Will it be exciting? Yes. Expensive? Kind of. Tight?
Well, the Gulds say they’re not worried about feeling cramped inside of a 140-square-foot stateroom for the 15-year option they just purchased. They recently spent 14 years together in a recreational vehicle, hitting each of the lower 48 states.
“We will not be in our room very much,” Chris says. “Every morning I plan to walk up the three decks to the gym where there’s an exercise class. And there’s the buffet where we will eat, and there’s entertainment in the afternoon.”
That might get boring after awhile if not for the port calls. The ship’s itinerary includes stops at 425 ports in more than 140 countries over the 3 1/2-year “Continual World Cruise.” The Gulds plan to get on the ship during its April 20 stop at the Colombian port of Cartagena and stay aboard for at least seven years, and longer if they love it.
The ship is currently in its seventh month sailing as the flagship of a Pembroke Pines-based company called Villa Vie Residences that the Gulds say offers the only affordable option for living on the sea. The company caters to people who truly want to get away from it all while still remaining connected through the Starlink internet service.
Mikael Petterson, the company’s chairman, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday that 354 of 480 cabins have been sold to long-term residents since the company purchased the Villa Vie Odyssey, built in 1993, from Fred Olsen Cruise Lines in 2023.
“We are looking forward to having Jim and Chris onboard,” Petterson said. “We are sure they will love it.”
A life of tech and travel together
The Gulds seem uniquely well-suited for permanent life aboard a cruise ship.
They met while Chris, now 72, operated a computer training center called Computer Savvy on Oakland Park Boulevard with her mother in the 1980s and 90s. Local companies would send employees for training on programs like WordPerfect, Novell NetWare, and Microsoft’s Excel and Access.
Jim, now 71, worked for a Deerfield Beach company, building, installing and networking personal computers. Chris purchased computers from the company for her training center, and Jim showed up to service them.
“So he had to keep coming back,” Chris said. Eventually, Chris hired Jim away from his company to focus full-time on her business.
They bonded over their mutual love of scuba diving, computers and travel. A few years after Chris sold the center and “retired” in the late 1990s, they sold their first Oakland Park house and bought an RV. They spent 14 years from 2003 to 2017 traveling the country, holding seminars to teach RV enthusiasts how to get on the internet, and creating computer training videos for a company they founded called Geeks on Tour.
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Subscribers to the Geeks on Tour website get access to a long list of class presentations, learning guides and tips. But anyone can click on more than 900 videos the couple has posted over the years, mostly while wearing their trademark propeller beanies.
Their earliest videos were a mix of travelogues and tutorials for types of software that travelers would use to take, upload and geotag photos, set up travel blogs, assign drive letters to external USB drives, and navigate highways.
More recently, their videos focus on smartphone apps, including how to shoot time-lapse video, use Google’s photo app, communicate over Zoom, and use WiFi calling if cellular service goes down.
Video bloggers amok
After seven years in another Oakland Park home, the couple is itching to travel again — but without the headaches of traffic and shopping.
The Gulds plan to continue to post training videos from the ship that show how they respond to challenges that arise as they visit the various ports on the ship’s itinerary. They’ve already started sharing their plans with their 16,700 YouTube subscribers and just under 1,000 paid Geeks on Tour members.
They won’t be alone using the internet to work on the ship, Jim says. A large number of the ship’s cabins are occupied by solo travelers who make their livings working remotely.
Like the Gulds, many shoot and post videos. A search for the ship on YouTube turns up several accounts — Living Life on a Cruise, MidLife Cruising, and DC Hidden Gems — by residents documenting their lives aboard the ship.
The cruise line offers a variety of pricing options, depending on the chosen size of living quarters and tour length.
Residents can purchase for up to 15 years or rent their cabins for shorter periods. Purchasers have the option of selling back unused portions of their residency terms, trading up to larger, more expensive cabins, or leasing or selling their space “with the potential of receiving a net return on your investment,” according to the company’s website.
The Gulds learned about the ship by following one of its residents, Randy Cassingham, longtime author of an online entertainment newsletter, This Is True. Cassingham started a blog called Residential Cruising after moving aboard the Villa Vie Odyssey last year.
“Jim said, ‘Take a look at this website about living on a cruise ship,’” Chris said. “And I looked at it and said, ‘OK!’”
Finding the right price
The couple said they were initially interested in buying a cabin with a balcony. But the company wanted $340,000 for a balcony cabin, plus $8,000 a month for amenities such as food, entertainment, health-club use and laundry services.
During a weeklong “try before you buy” sailing, the Gulds tried out a 140-square-foot cabin with a window and no balcony.
“Thankfully, I decided that I liked that because that was only only $170,000 up front and $5,000 a month,” Chris said. “At that rate, we might actually be saving money compared to all that we spent on travel last year.”
While on the “try it” trip, the couple says they met and were impressed with many of the residents who are experts in their chosen fields. They keep each other entertained by giving seminars and TED talks, the Gulds said.
“One guy used to be an emergency medical technician, so he gave a talk about what that’s like,” Chris said. “One was a marine biologist that gave a talk about whales.”
One amenity that won’t be available: casinos. “They actually had a poll,” Jim said, “and they asked the residents if they would consider having a casino. And they said, not just ‘no.’”
“They said, ‘hell, no,’” added Chris.
Not everyone was happy about the Gulds’ life-changing decision. While Chris has no children, Jim has a son from his previous marriage who lives near the couple.
“He was not for it at all at the very beginning when he first heard about it,” Jim said. “He thought that it was just a horrible thing that we were going to leave him.”
“But hey, he’s 44 years old, you know?” Chris said.
She added, “We’re still, in our opinion, fairly young. And we’re healthy, but we’re definitely getting older, so if we want to have one more chapter in our adventure, this is the time to do it. This is the next chapter.”
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