Say hola to Lobster Bob

He guessed about twenty. Somebody else had the real number.

It is Sunday, the one day Lobster Bob is not flying, sailing or driving anywhere. He is sitting in Hernán's shop in La Candelaria, Caracas, where the air smells of glue, old paper and the coffee on the hot plate at the back. Hernán is the man who binds Lobster Bob's logbooks: he stitches the pages together by hand and puts them inside a cover of real leather. Today's is dark red, because red leather lasts and green fades. The radio is off. The radio is never on while he sews.

While Hernán works, Lobster Bob tries to add up how many books have been made for him over the years, and says his guess out loud. Hernán puts down the needle, walks to the shelf, and comes back with a small notebook of his own. Sixty-eight. Every one written down: the day it came in, the day it left, the colour of the leather. Lobster Bob has carried those books across six continents. Hernán has carried the number.

Nothing happens in this story, and that is the point. Your child will learn what a bookbinder does, hear how a whole shop can go quiet for counting, and take away one question to think about at bedtime: what did you notice this week that you did not expect to notice? Then their own logbook starts, one line or one drawing at a time.

Follow free wherever you listen, and grab your free Explorer Pack at lobsterbobspodcast.com - the Paper Passport and My Logbook page, ready to print.

Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you.

Say hola to Lobster Bob

Five clues. One place on Earth. Shout it at the speaker.

Lobster Bob did not drive to this place and he did not fly. He went by water, on Nellie, PZ 1953 N, the boat he co-owns with Cpt. JT Peg, over water that was warm, clear and the colour of a jewel. Underneath her, stretching further than she could travel in a day, was something alive. The anchor never touched it. Not once in three visits, and it never will.

Then Lobster Bob put on a mask and a snorkel and floated face-down for one entire hour over something that has been building itself for twenty thousand years, built by builders smaller than your fingernail. When he climbed back aboard, he wrote four words in the log.

Your child will guess along through all five clues, add stamp number one to their Paper Passport when the answer lands, find the place on a map, and carry one big fact to bed: that the biggest things on Earth can be built by the smallest builders, one tiny piece at a time. Nobody loses. A wrong guess still counts as travel.

Follow free wherever you listen, and grab your free Explorer Pack at lobsterbobspodcast.com - the Paper Passport and My Logbook page, ready to print.

Say hola to Lobster Bob

El Cóndor and the Sulawesi Volcano

It did not explode. It cleared its throat.

El Cóndor, YV-528, is a bush plane bought at an auction in Caracas and named after the Andean condor, the largest flying bird in the world. The condor rides the air instead of fighting it, and Lobster Bob spent three years learning to do the same. On the morning of this story, at the airfield at Manado on the northern tip of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, he does his walk-around, touches the small nick on the propeller blade the way he always does, and takes off south along the coast, past a mountain everyone thought was asleep.

Then a column of grey ash rises off the summit, taller than the mountain itself. Ash is rock ground as fine as flour, and an engine that breathes it in stops being an engine. Lobster Bob turns away and drops towards the sea, and El Cóndor does what her namesake does: she finds the air going her way and rides it home, engine steady, nose level, never hurrying. They land with fine grey dust on her wings. A mechanic offers to smooth out the nick. Lobster Bob says no.

You will learn that Indonesia has more active volcanoes than any other country on Earth, why volcanic ash is so dangerous to aircraft, and how a condor can cross a sky almost without flapping. Nobody explains the nick. Nobody ever will.

Subscribe free wherever you listen, and grab your free Explorer Pack at lobsterbobspodcast.com - the Paper Passport and My Logbook page, ready to print.

Lobster Bob has been everywhere. Now he is taking you.

‍