Hyperfixed - Joe Rhodes - Unmoored, Part I

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

https://hyperfixedpod.com/joinJoe Rhodes is a former journalist that is writing about his experiences on the Villa Vie Odyssey, a cruise ship that has just embarked on a 3 & 1/2 year voyage. It hasn't all been smooth sailing. We talk to him about his experience. This is part one of a multi-part series we are running on our premium feed -- part II comes out next week!LINKS:Joe Rhodes' Substack  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I'm Dallas Taylor, host of the 20,000 Hertz Podcast. On our show, sound designers, musicians, and experts reveal the secrets behind the most iconic sounds in the world. From the I'm Lovin' It jingle, to the sound effects of Star Wars, from the Netflix To Doom, to the music and sounds of Zelda. To unlock your sonic world, follow 20,000 Hz right here in your podcast player. Why do people commit themselves to the things they do? Why are people so worried about sport? Why wine? Why video games?

I'm Brian Lowry, and in this season of my podcast, Know What You See, I'm asking a simple question, but a really big one. What's the point? In conversations with people with a variety of passions and obsessions, we get the chance to look through a window and see what it means to truly focus on a realm of human experience. Join me on Know What You See. New episodes begin November 26th. 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 the 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 Vi 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 of the Villa Vie 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 E 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, 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, there's no roller coasters, there's no casino, there's 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 on May 15th out of Southampton. 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 um, so it was a very pleasant experience other than the fact that we weren't going anywhere. Um, and that certainly wasn't the adventure they had signed up for. So I am curious, why are you doing this again? Uh, because I didn't have anything better

to do. It, it, it, which sounds rather 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 US 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. 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 you know, 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 time share it, do whatever you want, or you can just rent it like you rent 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 advantage is that 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 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? And, 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, gave them the green light to go ahead and go. And we immediately, I mean, it's like, it's like we just robbed a bank. We just hauled our butts out of there and they told us at first 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.

Which, great, you know, 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 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 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 rooms and the corridor had a certain essence to it for a while. Aaron Ross Deposits is a very diplomatic phrasing,

honestly. Steve McLaughlin It was the best one I could think of. Aaron Ross You did great. Steve McLaughlin 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 them, has filed a lawsuit. Wow.

Were complaining about, you know, why isn't this working? When are you gonna 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 him, had him 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. 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 complained, but 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 a peer pressure Element that says, you know, why are you making trouble rocking the boat so to speak? Particularly after the first the first two passengers got uh thrown off 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, had 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. You know, 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 are the ownership in some way. Hey, this is Alex.

I just wanted to tell you very quickly about what's going to be our first live performance. Hyperfixed is a media partner of On Air Fest 2025, the premier festival for sound and storytelling. On Air Fest is three days and four nights of live podcast performances and parties and in addition to Hyperfixed, the festival will be featuring people like Rosie Perez, Taylor Lorenz, Sam Sanders, Jad Abumrad, Jay Wortham, Anderson Cooper, Penn Badgley, Mehdi Hassan, and way too many other people to name. It is going to be wild. And my biggest disappointment is that I am going to be too busy making episodes of Hyperfixed to attend every performance. And because you are a Hyperfix listener, if you use the promo code HYPERFIX10, you will get 10% off of your tickets. You can find the lineup, schedule information, and way more at onairfest.com.

That's onairfest.com. Use the promo code HYPERFIX10 for 10% off your tickets. I'm just curious, like, you said that you lived in a van for 13 years before you did this. I'm curious, 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? Well, how would I describe it tradition 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 person? Is that what you meant to say? Yes. Yeah, in the politest way possible. Yes. I'd been, I was, I was a working journalist, a 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 certainly didn't want to move to New York. That wasn't gonna 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 was a cool this would be a cool way to live. And so I, you know, took some time

and found a used Sprinter van and had it refurbished and with a bed and a shower and a microwave and a toilet and and you know 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 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, it's 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, you know, 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 in the last few days. For me, for some of the cruise life people, they're still unhappy because the pools are not yet operational.

Their swimming pool is not operating. I don't care because I'm not going to be up there anyway. But 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 buy 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 be some weight bearing issues underneath it. It's, it's a, it's a million little things. Some of them incredibly petty, but some of them obviously quite serious.

You don't, 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, I think that's not the proper use of the pool. What do you think the percentage shot is that you're going to, 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. But 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. In fact, I'd be surprised if I made it to January. It can't keep on going like it has. How did you perceive before you went on this trip? What was your perception of cruises? I signed up for this not having ever been on a cruise of any kind. Some friends of mine suggested that perhaps I was an idiot. Have you made any friends on the trip so far?

Yeah. Everybody's been really nice. There's no one that I actually hate yet I don't 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 yeah, yeah, you can do without what you will. I mean, immediately it 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've 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 like they went and selected the worst Available beers and said these are the ones we're gonna 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. It's not even real high Why would they do that? Well, apparently nobody that buys stuff for them drinks actual beer. So I would say that's been the most suffering I've endured is just trying to get by drinking Corona. How do you prepare for something like this?

Like what, I mean, you were already living in a van, so you were already pretty mobile. I assume that your possessions were pretty paired down. 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 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 in 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, you know, there may be some complications getting some prescription drugs in some places, but so far that hasn't been

an issue. But no, I didn't have to do anything. You know, lots of people sold their houses and disowned their children and 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. If the cruise doesn't work, they're back at the side of the road, which for me would not be that big a thing. 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. The prefix was produced by Amor Yates, Emma Cortland, and Sari Sufer Sukenek. It was edited by Amor 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 hyperfixpod.com slash join. This show can't exist without your problems to solve, so head on over to hyperfixpod.com and submit your problems. HyperFixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening.

We'll see you soon. RadioTopia from PRX.