I got to spend some time at the Mall of America this past week in Minnesota. Most of the machines were retired and gone, but I managed to score a bunch from the mall.
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Came across this brand new machine at bravo farms in kettleman city. Must have been less than a few weeks old. It does not show on any of the penny collection forums yet.
I finally made it back down to San Diego to get the last round of pennies that I had missed on previous trips.... The elusive San Diego Zoo. I managed to get about 90 percent of the pennies in the park on our little trip, but ran out of time and resources. The information from the park about the locations of the machines was hit and miss, and online information was very out dated. I resorted to the old fashioned method of walking and looking. We should be able to go back soon and I will get the others that I had missed as well as anything new that pops up. Had a great day with the family around the aquarium of the pacific in Long Beach. I did manage to get 20 pressed pennies inside the aquarium, but the last 4 were unavailable due to the dreaded out of order sign. The feed mechanism was jammed with pennies, so it would have been a waste to even try. I did identify two other machines in the area that were not listed on pennycollector.com.
A couple more shots of the penny pressing action in Hawaii ! In both of these pictures I was not embarrased at all to be pressing because my audience was entirely composed of Japanese tourists who did not speak English.
I finally made it back to Hawaii to finish the collecting I started 6 years ago. This time I made the rounds on Oahu. The machines in Waikiki were fairly easy as our hotel was mostly within walking distance. A couple of the presses were gone due to construction and one was missing completely. Among the highlights of the trip were Pearl Harbor, air museum, the Dole plantation, and the Polynesian cultural center (which also had a broken machine). I also searched the inside of the new Disney resort but found no machines much to my surprise. I managed to bag a mere 70 pennies in total, falling short of my expectations, but leaving just enough to warrant another trip back. So I ended up in Texas without any supplies, so I had to make due with what I could. I traded 5 bucks for some assorted change but alas, all new pennies. With great dismay I proceeded to press four zinc beauties. They ended up very short. Apparently there were two 4 design machines in the area but I only found the one. Yee-haw I finally got the last batch of Disney World pennies out of the shaker and into the flips. If I didn't have such high standards, it wouldn't have taken so long. Some of the pennies I pressed out of desperation were heavily tarnished and require lots of extra processing.now that they are preserved the next step is to put them back into their original groups. Look for my next post which should be a video slideshow of some if the designs. So Here it is the grand total of 365 pennies from Walt Disney World. Can you imagine the look on the TSA agent's face when they saw this come through security on the X-ray monitor in the airport. Even though the hard part of locating and pressing is done, the real work now begins. I will continue to post updates on how the processing and cataloging process is going. All of these are loaded into the shaker for another tumble to get rid of the faint traces of the date and design marks. Here is the first group of about 80 coins fresh out of the shaker perfectly clean and brilliantly shining. It will take me at least three days to get them to the state where they need to be before putting them into their coin flips. Lets see how it looks with our friend Dopey. After all the pennies are put into flips, I can begin the process of re-building the sets into the 3 or 4 designs the way they came out of the machines. I'll keep you posted. At this point in the trip I was running out of pressed penny steam, but I knew the end was in sight. I was already buying quarter rolls at an alarming rate and getting dangerously low on my polished pennies, but this park had the least amount of machines. The highlight of the day was a store that had three penny machines in it that were all encased in hand carved wooden cases. The funniest thing was that the pennies had to exit through the carved tiger's mouth. Check out the Youtube video below to see how the pennies fly out as if they were being spit out. I acually skipped a couple of quarter machines in this park because I was just out of supplies. I even had to borrow the last 2 pennies on the last machine leaving the park because I was plain out. Final day haul (day 4) 63 coins animal kingdom. |
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