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.”

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.

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.