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.

‍

Say hola to Lobster Bob

A postcard from a rock that does not belong to the person looking at it.

La Mula, LAM-001-VE, carries Lobster Bob into the centre of Australia, to Uluru, the sandstone monolith rising 348 metres above the desert. It appears on the horizon forty kilometres out, a low shape, then a larger shape, then the only shape there is.

At the cultural centre, in thirty-eight degree heat, the woman at the visitor desk hands him a leaflet explaining what visitors do and do not do here. The climbing chain went up in 1964 and came down in 2019, after the Anangu had asked for thirty-five years.

Lobster Bob was never planning to climb. But he catches himself about to ask whether the rule applies to him, and he does not ask.

That is the failure, and the postcard. He walks the base instead, past waterholes and rock art, sits at Mutitjulu Waterhole for forty minutes, and watches the rock turn from brown to orange to deep red as the light drops.

You will learn who the Anangu people are and why the climb closed, why Uluru changes colour through the afternoon, and the fact to carry to school: the Pyramids of Giza are four and a half thousand years old, and people had been living at Uluru for tens of thousands of years before the first stone was laid.

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

The storm had the fearsome name. The boat had the name of somebody's grandmother.

Nellie, PZ 1953 N, is co-owned by Lobster Bob and Cpt. JT Peg, the only vehicle in the fleet with two owners. On the evening of this story she is at anchor off the Galapagos Islands, almost exactly on the equator, when the sea goes wrong. Not loud. Quiet. The water goes flat, the wrong kind of flat, and the sky turns the colour of a bruise. Cpt. JT Peg is far away on the radio and uses exactly one sentence.

Then the storm arrives and stays all night. The waves come in sets, each taller than the last. Nellie puts her bow into every one, climbs it, comes down the other side, and waits for the next. No drama. No complaint. By dawn the sea is calm and bright, the penguins on the black rocks are entirely unimpressed, and there is nothing to write in the maintenance log.

You will learn that the Galapagos Islands are the only place on Earth where penguins live north of the equator, what it means to put a boat's bow into a wave, and why a plain, steady name can carry you through a night that a fearsome one only dreamed of.

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.

Say hola to Lobster Bob

Three books, one guidebook, and lost in twenty minutes.

Lobster Bob parks La Mula, LAM-001-VE, outside the Blue Gate of Fes, in Morocco, because no car can enter the old city. Inside are about nine thousand alleys, and people have lived among them since the year 789. He walks in feeling very prepared. He passes the same blue tile once, then twice. The third time, a boy of about eleven is standing beside it, watching, and does not laugh.

The boy walks him back to the gate. It takes an hour and about twenty turns Lobster Bob never noticed missing, and the boy is gone before he can offer anything. The next day Lobster Bob leaves the map at the hotel, sits at a small tea shop near the oldest university on Earth, and watches three women take an hour to buy bread. That hour gives him Fes. On the way out, he knows the way.

You will learn that the world's oldest university, the Al-Qarawiyyin, was founded in Fes in 859 by a woman named Fatima al-Fihri, why the streets of the old city are too narrow for cars, and how a place can become a rhythm once you stop rushing it. And you will hear today's Bob'ism, earned the hard way.

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

A river that arrives under a blue sky, with no rain anywhere in sight.

Lobster Bob drives La Mula, LAM-001-VE, the four by four, down into a dry riverbed in Kaokoland, in the north-west of Namibia, inside the oldest desert on Earth.

The sand is flat and firm. The sky is blue in every direction. He has checked the weather where he is. He has not checked the mountains sixty kilometres away, where it rained two days before.

Halfway across, the sand begins to shine. The water arrives the way a door closes: a shine, then wheels, then doors, with branches knocking on her sides. La Mula does not hesitate. She climbs out onto dry ground as if it were an ordinary thing to do before lunch, and Lobster Bob comes out of that riverbed a good deal more humble than he went in.

You will learn why some rivers in Namibia look like sandy roads for years, how rain on faraway mountains can send water across a desert, and why a fifty-five million year old desert and a one-hour flood can both be true at once. Something to hold at dinner tonight.

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

Hola! You, yes YOU, have a seat reserved on the greatest adventure on Earth. No ticket. No queue. Lobster Bob has been to 528 real destinations across six continents, by land, by sea and by air, and he never travels alone: La Mula the four by four that refuses to quit, Nellie the beautiful boat he shares with Captain JT Peg, and El Cóndor, the little bush plane with the biggest heart in the sky.

A new tour every single day:

• La Mula, Nellie and El Cóndor: the vehicles tell their stories on Monday, Wednesday and Friday
• Bob'isms: one small piece of wisdom to carry in your pocket
• Postcards from Lobster Bob: a postcard arrives from somewhere wonderful
• Where in the World?: five clues, one answer, and a stamp for your Paper Passport
• Lobster Bob's Logbook: Sunday night, the logbook opens, and Lobster Bob reads

And everything he will ever tell you is REAL. Real mountains you can stand on. Real markets that smell of a hundred spices. Real people doing wonderful things.

Follow free wherever you listen, and grab your free Explorer Pack at lobsterbobspodcast.com - the Paper Passport and My Logbook page, ready to print. The world is not going to wait forever.

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