Joe Rhodes - Unmoored, Part I

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Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is HyperFixed.

So, this week, we are unlocking a bonus episode, and we are doing that for a couple of reasons.

First of all, we are a very small crew.

We have limited resources, and unfortunately, a wrench was kind of thrown in the works on an episode that we had planned to put out this week.

It needs a little more time in the oven, so we are kicking it down the road a couple weeks, which will allow us to both fine-tune that episode for maximum enjoyment, and give us a little breathing room to get ahead on some forthcoming episodes.

And the second reason that we wanted to unlock this episode specifically is because it's the first in a series that we started on the bonus feed, and we're very excited to see where this series will go.

It's a story about a problem without a solution.

In fact, it's a problem that, in a lot of ways, is self-made.

It's about a person who, pretty early on, knew that he was walking into a mess and he chose to charge headlong into it anyway.

So I don't know if you've heard of this, but there's a cruise ship called the Villa V Odyssey that's just embarked on a three and a half year cruise.

It took off from Belfast in October, and over the next three years, it'll be taking passengers to every continent and dropping anchor in hundreds of cities.

If the whole enterprise sounds pretty stunty, that is at least partially by design.

A bunch of the passengers are trying to parlay this experience into social media celebrity, starting YouTube channels with names like Living Life on a Cruise and Midlife Cruisin'.

But what's ended up gaining the most social media traction for the Villa V Odyssey have been a cascade of mishaps and false starts.

When it finally left port in early October, it was over four and a half months past its originally scheduled departure date due to a cavalcade of mishaps, poor planning, and paperwork delays.

One of these passengers, who I suppose you could call a social media influencer if you count a substack written by a retired journalist as social media, is Joe Rhodes.

We were so fascinated by his substack, we decided to ask him if he could do some dispatches from the ship over the course of its voyage, and he agreed.

This is our first conversation about how things are going.

We recorded this interview in October, a couple weeks after they set sail, and we're publishing our second interview with him on the bonus feed next week.

We plan on staying with him, regularly interviewing him and his friends and family, and perhaps even the owners owners of the Villa v.

Odyssey, if they'll talk to us.

But first, we'd love you to meet Joe Rhodes.

Joe's audio can be a little iffy here and there, but we did our best.

He is on cruise ship Wi-Fi, after all.

I think to start,

I'm just wondering if you could introduce yourself, name, age, and where you're living right now.

I'm Joe Rhodes.

I'm 69 years old, about to turn 70, and I'm currently in my cabin on the v of odyssey residential cruise ship where i plan to be living for the next three and a half years can you tell me as a person who's never been on a cruise um i'm imagining the ship you're on to be like one of those giant carnival cruise line it's very much not that one of the there's a lot of things appealing about this but one of them is that it's not that

it's uh there's no roller coasters there's no casino there's uh no no screaming kids running around with the pool noodles.

They converted the casino into a business center because they think of this as

a floating residential complex.

And a good percentage of the people that are on board are digital nomads who are able to run their business.

as long as they've got good Wi-Fi from pretty much anywhere in the world.

So they're trying to make it as convenient as possible for those people to be able to continue to work.

And then

a bigger chunk are people like me who are retired and have just given up on life.

How long have you actually been living on the boat?

I've only been on the boat for about a week and a half.

We were initially supposed to sail May 15th out of Southampton.

Okay.

But I knew and everybody knew before we actually got to England that there would be what we thought was a small delay, a couple of weeks,

and that it would be moved to Belfast, that we'd be leaving from Belfast because the ship was going into dry dock to get some pretty basic things done.

The ship is an older ship.

It's 30 years old, and it has not been in action since pre-COVID.

And the longer we were there, the more people became aware of the ship people.

That's how they refer to us.

And so we were sort of like

many celebrities.

People were happy to see us.

And if they found out you were one of the ship people, oh, they'd buy you a drink and, you know, ask you questions and make sure you were okay.

And

so it was a very pleasant experience, other than the fact that we weren't going anywhere.

And that certainly wasn't the adventure they had signed up for.

So I am curious: why are you doing this this again?

Because I didn't have anything better to do.

Which sounds like I'm just making that up, but it's kind of true.

I've lived in a van for the last 13 years.

I'm a retired journalist.

And when I retired, because I was a journalist and worked at lots and lots of different publications, I had friends scattered all across North America.

And the idea of living in a van as opposed to being in one place was really appealing because it meant I could go see all my friends whenever I felt like it.

So that's what I did.

But 13 years is a long time

to

look for new places.

I'd basically been everywhere in the U.S.

and Canada, you know, three or four times over the course of that 13 years.

There were not a whole lot of surprises

left to, you know, I knew what was around the next corner pretty much everywhere I went.

So I felt like I was in a little bit of a rut and

wanted to change the chemistry a little bit.

And then the news reports about this idea of these residential cruise ships came up and this operation in particular, where they were going to go everywhere you could take a ship, could live in your apartment.

And most importantly, for me,

not that expensive comparatively speaking.

You know, there have been residential cruise ships before, and there are still some others out there, but you've got to be a millionaire to go on them.

You have to be a literal millionaire just to qualify.

And they've got helipads.

Depending on how you acquire your cabin here, you could either buy it like a condominium and

own it and sublet it and timeshare it, do whatever you want, or you can just rent it like you're renting an apartment, pay a monthly fee.

And for me,

for the small cabin that I'm in, that fee is I pay $3,500 a month for my apartment.

But that includes food.

That includes the gym, the Wi-Fi, the doctor visits, the laundry, the maid,

pretty much everything you need,

all included in that $3,500 a month.

And the other advantages be you wake up.

every day in a new place.

And I thought, well, that's a pretty good deal.

And they also arranged it so that I didn't have to put a big chunk of money up front.

I could basically pay as I go.

So I thought, even if it turns out to be just a

hellscape, I'll always have the ability to bail out if I want.

And it seems like more interesting than just continuing to drive down the same highways that I've been driving down the last 13 years.

I think I'll give it a shot.

It's not any deeper than that.

It's like, it seemed like an interesting thing to do at a time when I was looking for something new to do.

And so I signed up.

I think this makes me very different than most of the people on board.

How is that?

Most of the people on board, this has been

the dream of their life to live on a cruise ship.

These are people, these are hardcore cruise people.

They took cruise ships to get over here to get on the cruise.

When the cruise got delayed, they filled the time by getting on another cruise.

So in a word, how would you describe the experience so far?

So far, I would say it's been incredibly frustrating because very little has gone right so far.

Above and beyond the four months of being stranded in Belfast, once we got out of Belfast, a myriad of things went wrong right away.

First, including that it turns out we weren't really allowed out of Belfast.

We got on September 30th, the evening of September 30th, and the news crews were there and the champagne was there and there was confetti and glitter and

sparklers and champagne.

But then it turned out we weren't actually cleared to go anywhere.

So all we could do was leave the cruise terminal and then about 10 miles offshore, they dropped the anchor and then we had to stay there for another three days.

That seems like a pretty profound oversight.

Yes.

The people that own the ship would argue that basically

the inspectors kept changing the rules on them.

And they would say, if you just do these three things and you're free to go.

And then they would do those three things.

And then suddenly the inspectors would say, oh, you know, but you've also got to do this thing.

But who knows what the real reason is?

You know, it may just be that the ship was not in good enough shape to sail and it was really hard to get it there.

So anyway, so we spent three days offshore.

They finally, and I don't know what changed, uh gave them the green light to go ahead and go and we immediately i mean it's like uh it's like we just robbed a bank we just hauled our butts out of there and they told us at first we were we were going to scotland to do some sort of refueling stop

but somewhere in the next few hours changed their minds and decided that we'd be going to Brest, France instead.

Great.

Everybody was just so happy to be A on the ship and B going anywhere that nobody really cared where we were going.

But I guess, and I'm not entirely clear on this,

but I think the amount of time we spent anchored offshore

and some other problems that may have preceded that meant that the wastewater tanks

filled up much more quickly than they thought they would.

So

they had to turn off the, at first they just turned off the hot water.

So that happened the night we were still anchored offshore.

So there's no hot water.

Nobody could take a shower unless you're willing to shiver.

And then they said, but we'll get it fixed when we get to France.

On the way to France, apparently the situation got more critical.

So they turned off the water altogether.

There's now no water.

Wait, there's currently no water?

There was no water of any kind, nothing in the faucet, nothing in the shower.

Most importantly, nothing that makes the toilets work.

And how long did that last?

That lasted

a couple of days, a day.

They finally,

they were working on it frantically,

but it...

it just took them longer to do.

And this happened in the middle of the night.

And a lot of people didn't realize it had happened.

So they got up and went about their their morning business and then realized that the deposits they made were not being transferred to another place.

And so you had a lot of people sitting around

with the stinkier roofs.

And

the corridor had a certain essence to it for a while.

Deposits is a very diplomatic phrasing,

honestly.

It was the best one I could think of.

You did great.

It's not the word we used

on the ship, believe me.

We get to Brest,

and it turns out that they had not been able to secure a port that allowed us to get off the ship.

We had to dock at a container port.

So now we're stuck there while they work on the water tanks,

but we can't get off the boat yet again.

It's an ongoing source of anger and resentment and frustration.

And there's been a lot of back and forth and a lot of finger pointing.

And

some of us have complained more publicly than others.

A couple of people complained so much they

wouldn't let them come on the cruise.

While we were still stuck in Belfast,

a couple of women, at least one of whom has filed a lawsuit.

Wow.

We're complaining about, you know, why isn't this working?

When are you going to tell us about that?

To the point where management said, you know what?

We don't think we want you to be with us and booted them, had them walk the plank.

I am, I think, a very tolerant consumer for the most part.

I would be pretty annoyed, too.

I mean, people are giving up their lives on shore to go on this trip for three years.

And I don't think there's anybody that wasn't annoyed.

It was just a question of how they dealt with it.

And some of us, you know, complained,

but,

you know,

with the

limitations.

Some of us, there's also very much a cheerleading faction on the ship that doesn't think anybody should complain about anything because we're pioneers, for God's sakes.

Nobody's ever done this before.

We should be grateful just to be a part of it.

And so when anybody does complain, there's definitely a peer pressure element that says, you know, why are you making trouble?

Rocking the boat, so to speak.

Particularly after the first two passengers got thrown off,

have been keeping their complaints largely to themselves because

they're afraid if they ask too many questions or cause too much of a stink,

they'll kick them off too.

And people that have bought units in particular, more so than me.

As a renter, I've got less at stake here than almost anybody.

The worst that's going to happen to me is I'll lose next month's rent for some reason.

But the people that have bought their units have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars invested in this thing and its success.

So they, they are the ownership in some way.

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I'm just curious, like,

you said that you lived in a van for 13 years before you did this.

I'm curious,

and I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but why?

Why were you living in a van as opposed to living,

how would I describe it?

Traditionally, in a house, in a home?

Like a normal person?

Why weren't you living like a normal person?

Is that what you meant to say?

Yes.

Yeah, in the politest way possible.

Yes.

I was a working journalist, freelance journalist.

The business, as you well know, was shrinking rapidly, and I didn't think I could afford to keep living in Los Angeles, and I needed to make a change of some sort.

But there wasn't any particular place that I wanted to go.

I didn't want to, I certainly didn't want to move to New York.

That wasn't going to make my life any easier.

And it occurred to me that what I'd really like to do is to be able to just go wherever I wanted, whenever I felt like it, see all my friends, continue to work, and

also

not have to spend as much money as it would cost me to keep living in Los Angeles, considering that my income was shrinking.

And so I decided that the way to do that was to live in a van, which of course has now become a thing.

There was no hashtag then.

There was no hashtag Van Life back then?

Van Life was not a hashtag.

But I thought

this would be a cool way to live.

And so I

took some time and found a used Sprinter van and had it refurbished with a bed and a shower and a microwave and a toilet and

everything I thought I needed.

And then just basically spent the next 13 years drifting around the continent and having a great time.

It was absolutely the best decision I ever made.

How would you characterize the decision to get on the ship?

Right now, I would say not as good a decision.

A lot of the, excuse me, a lot of the bars and restaurants are not yet open.

There have been a number of problems with plumbing.

and also with air conditioning.

And

I think for some people, the Wi-Fi has not been up to their expectation.

It's been fine for me, but I know some people that need a lot of bandwidth

has been left short for them a few times.

But the food is good.

The showers are great.

The people are great.

But there's a lot of things that they just didn't get around to.

And then we're going to Gibraltar.

We're going to Casablanca.

we're going to Senegal all in the next couple of weeks.

That's great.

It's not great if we can't use the toilet or take a shower.

But I'm fairly confident that we're past that part.

I mean, maybe we're not.

We're going to see how it holds up.

But if things keep improving to the degree that they have over the last few days, there have really been no significant problems the last few days.

For me,

for some of the um uh cruise life people they're still unhappy because the pools are not yet operational the their swimming pool is not operating i don't care because i'm not going to be up there anyway but uh it that's a big deal and of course by the time they get to the caribbean and places like that they're certainly going to want to be able to lounge in and by the pool so there's a apparently there's a crack.

They can't fill them up until they've fixed it.

And also there may may be some weight-bearing issues underneath it.

It's a million little things,

some of them incredibly petty, but some of them obviously quite serious.

You don't want the pool to be collapsing down on the people in the deck below.

So,

yeah, no, I'm against it.

I've always said that about pools.

I don't want them falling on me.

No,

that's not the proper use of the pool.

What do you think

the percentage shot is that you're going to last all the way to the end of this thing?

If I live through Antarctica,

I think I will complete the journey.

And when is Antarctica?

Antarctica is in January.

If stuff is breaking all the time and you just never know from one day to the next.

what's going to be operational.

No,

there's no chance that I would make the whole three and a half years.

years in fact i'd be surprised if i made it to january uh that it can't keep on going like it has how did you perceive before you went on this trip how what was your perception of uh of um cruises i signed up for this not having ever been on a cruise of any kind uh some friends of mine uh suggested that uh perhaps i was an idiot um have you have you made any friends on the trip so far yeah uh everybody's been really nice i had there's no one that that I actually hate yet.

I don't know that I've

made any friends for life.

It's a cruise ship, which means that it tends to be a little bit older and I think more conservative crowd.

And there's a lot of people from Florida here.

So

you can do with that

what you will.

I mean,

immediately I conjured a certain person to mind, but that person happens to be my mom who lives in Tampa.

Okay, well, there you go.

I'm sure your mom would be very happy here.

Yeah, I think she probably would.

And there's a lot of people's moms here,

and they're mostly lovely people.

I don't know, you know, I don't know if I found any kindred spirits yet, but I might.

My biggest complaint so far has been that the beer that they serve in the local bar, in the

ship's bars has been terrible.

Oh, what's wrong with the beer?

What do they serve in there?

It's just it's it's like they went and selected the worst uh available beers and said these are the ones we're going to sell you here's your choice you've got your choices of your bud light your coors light oh no your corona or your heineken but the heineken is zero percent alcohol not even real heineken why would they do that well apparently nobody in that buys stuff for them drinks actual beer so uh i would say that's been the the the most uh suffering I've endured is just trying to get by,

you know, drinking Corona.

How do you prepare for something like this?

Like, what, what, what, I mean, you were already living in a van, so you were already pretty mobile.

I assume that your

possessions were pretty paired.

This required less of a lifestyle change for me than I'll bet for anybody else on the ship because I'd already gotten rid of all my stuff.

And my room here on the van is actually, I mean, here on the ship, see, that was Freudian.

My room on the ship is bigger than the room I lived in on the van.

So it's not like I had to make a lot of hard choices about what to bring or not bring with me.

I loaded what I needed into a couple of suitcases and then unloaded them in the room.

That was pretty much it.

I didn't have to, I already didn't have a permanent address.

I had to, you know,

so I kept the address that I have, which is the address of a friend in Texas.

And so all my documents and stuff go there, but 90% of the transactions of life happen online now anyway.

So, so it, you know, there may be some complications getting some

prescription drugs in some places.

But so far, we, that hasn't been an issue.

But for, no, I didn't have to do anything.

You know, lots of people sold their houses and, you know, disowned their children and,

you know, made major.

And those are the people that have particularly suffered with all the uncertainty.

It's like

they have no home to go to.

This is it.

You know, if they, if the, if the cruise doesn't work,

they're, they're back at the side of the road, which for me would not be that big a thing.

Hey, I love talking.

We love talking to you, Joe.

This was so fun.

I'm looking forward to doing this again soon.

Thank you so much.

All right, man.

Bye.

Take care.

Hyperfixed was produced by Amore Yates, Emma Cortland, and Sari Suffer Sukenek.

It was edited by Amore Yates.

It is hosted by me, Alex Goldman.

The music in this episode was by me.

It was engineered by Tony Williams.

Fact-checking by Sona Avakian.

I know it's annoying to hear podcasters constantly ask you to become premium members, but it's really the only way for us to keep afloat these days.

So, if you want to hear bonus episodes, join our Discord, follow the continuing saga of Joe Rhodes, and much, much more, go to hyperfixedpod.com/slash join.

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