Living & working
at home on a ship
for 3½ years
visiting 425 ports, 147 countries, on
7 continents.

Latest Posts

See all previous posts.

• CBS gets it (a little closer to) right … but no cigar!20 July, 2025
  It has been months since the YouTube, blog, vlog, etc. sites blasted Villa Vie and the Odyssey with the “haters” having a field day. Thankfully the major media were a bit more balanced, and just today the program “CBS Saturday Morning” came out with a seven minute video about the… Read more: CBS gets it (a little closer to) right … but no cigar!
• ALASKA – College Fjord, and Comments on Community19 July, 2025
  Two days ago, this was the view of a flat ocean at about 20:10 approaching Prince William Sound, Alaska: When I woke up the next morning before 08:00, these were views from – One of the two portholes in my cabin: At breakfast on the back deck – And moving… Read more: ALASKA – College Fjord, and Comments on Community
• Alaska—Tracy Arm Fjord, and Community13 July, 2025
  At the moment, Odyssey is sitting, motionless, on an ice-bespeckled branch of the Alaskan fjords with a view of a gorgeous blue-ice glacier in the valley in front of the bow. Within a stone’s throw on both sides, we are surrounded by steep, craggy mountains occasionally covered with forests of… Read more: Alaska—Tracy Arm Fjord, and Community

*About This Blog, and Me

A unique life adventure.

Join me and a few hundred others as we become an oceangoing community on the Villa Vie Odyssey, a small cruise ship, for a first-ever three-plus year live-and-work aboard life traveling around the world and visiting 427 planned destinations in 147 countries! And when it’s over, it just keeps on going to do it all over again—a perpetual circumnavigation.

Roughly half of us are permanent liveaboards, some of us own our cabins. The rest will join and disembark at locations around the globe, staying at least three months, usually about six months, some planning the entire journey. I am one of the fortunate residents to own my cabin. Just like a house, I can redecorate it, rent it if I’m not there, will it to my beneficiaries, or sell it at will.

Through this website, you are invited to come along with us on the continuing adventure. I will be posting regularly as a Resident not affiliated with Villa Vie Residences. Other Resident websites can be found at the “Other Links” menu item at the top.

What is this blog all about?

This is not a travelogue although I expect there will be a lot of travel related topics and some photos and maybe videos. My goal is not to maximize subscribers, so it will probably lack some of the “mass interest” stuff, and will studiously avoid click-bait. It will mostly have musings on many topics: my views on differing viewpoints and interpretations of our life aboard, what we experience, and how we’re feeling about it all. But there are LOTS of other websites/blogs/vlogs/YouTube Channels and general media coverage about this trip. I’ll list some Resident Websites/blogs, etc. as they come to my attention (see the menu for “Other Links“) but search for “Villa Vie Odyssey” or “Villa Vie Residents”, or some-such and a gazillion articles are all over the web. I won’t attempt to keep up with the articles. Some are really good, some are really kak. A lot of them are really kak. (See Afrikaans for translation.)

Everyone on the ship will have their own reasons for going. In my case, I’ll have the privacy of a cabin to be able to concentrate and become a good writer. It’s kind of like my own Walden Pond. I’ll also develop a business (online) doing Voice Over Acting, and enjoy people, world wide locations, and the wide open sea when I walk out the door.

The Odyssey’s journey planned journey was to begin in May 2024. Due to unforeseen situations, it now launches from Belfast, Ireland in late September 2024. I was delayed in joining the ship for personal reasons, but it worked out because I managed to miss a lot of the disruptions accompanying the delays. On the other hand, Villa Vie Residences (VVR) has done a lot, and its best, to take care of people expecting to join the voyage earlier. VVR has helped defray personal expenses associated with the delays, sometimes sending them on other cruises or to resort locations until our ship got ready. Management of VVR reports that the ship is 80% owned by residents in the form of stock in VVR, but that’s an unofficial report.

Many different sources vary slightly on their reports of the number of cabins, passengers, crew, and other specifics. But they seem to gather around a maximum capacity of about 500 passenger cabins holding about 800 passengers, about 100 crew cabins with about 200 crew members. Currently (September 2024) there are over 300 people on the community only website, but not all residents are signed up. Of residents that provide information publicly available, one of the residents compiled some statistics: a bit fewer than 70% register “home” as the U.S.A., but that means (sort of) holding a U.S. Passport. There is no accepted standard for registering nationality. I’ve found that a large number of those actually are permanent residents of a country other than the U.S.A. Personally, I hope the “non-US” passenger percentages increases as we start the circumnavigation and pick up additional passengers.

If you have a thought about a post, please comment on it. And, if you have an article you think would add to the site, please feel free to send it to me for consideration as a blog entry attributed to you (see Contact Me > Direct Message). In today’s world, a community doesn’t have to be all in one geographic location (or onboard one ship), but can, and I hope will, include interested people from all over the world.

What’s my story?

A U.S. Expat, I am a Permanent Resident of Namibia, and own a house (now being leased out) in my adopted hometown of Oranjemund after having lived and sailed on a Passport 42 (13 m) sailboat for twenty-six years.

I’ve been a Peace Corps Volunteer, a fighter pilot, an actor, a father, a corporate executive (not fun), an airport shuttle driver, a hang-glider, an instructor pilot, an adjunct professor for a graduate school program, a free-lance programmer, a certified project management professional, and several other things over the last fifty years. I’ve been mostly self-employed, sometimes unemployed, and have lived, worked, or travelled in almost fifty countries (not counting just changing airplanes). This is more than a lot of people, not nearly as many as some people, and not as much international exposure as I would like. But I was a late starter. See “About Me” for more info on my eclectic life.

This journey promises to be a personal capstone for over seven decades of varied experiences. I look forward to being a small part of creating a community of like-minded people, maybe including you if you follow along with us. How cool is that!

Before this trip, debacle!

If you haven’t seen any of the gazillion articles in worldwide publications announcing that the Life At Sea Cruise by Miray was canceled at the end of 2023, it is the sad truth. I published a blog post summarizing the situation in January 2024: (What Happened? Now What? (The Short Story). As of now, The booked Residents (including me) on that cruise are still hoping to get our money back. A very few have it all, many have most of it, and a few have nothing back as yet.

There are many articles from major publications about the debacle, and a very few good or accurate ones, but the one I recommend is from CNN as it gives a very good picture of the “behind the scenes” activities. Or you can just search the Internet for “Life At Sea Cruise cancellation” if you like gory details, many with questionable accuracy.

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Don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE so you can stay up with things as they progress and see photos, videos, and writeups from me, and others, on our experiences as they happen. You will get a maximum of one email per week unless you specifically request daily notices. In any case, you are only notified if I publish a new post. Neither the mailing list, nor any personal information, is never, ever, sold or released to anyone else.

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