Monday, April 2, 2007

Pressed Penny Hunting in Epcot

This past December, in order to make our day at Epcot a little bit more fun for the kids in the World Showcase I came up with a Pressed Penny Hunt. Pressed Pennies have been around as long as there have been pennies. Not really, but close. There are hundreds of pressed penny machines in WDW. I was able to find a web site before we left that listed all of them. Very odd that someone would keep track of this, but there is a collector for everything and thanks to him this hunt was a hit. From the list, I saw that there is a pressed penny for each country, with a Disney character or characters on it. The goal of our hunt was to get one from each country. By this simple addition to our park planning every new country we walked into became an adventure. Hunting around looking for the machine and checking out a lot of stuff we might not have seen. By the end of the day we had all but two countries. Mexico, whose machine was out of order and Japan. We could just not find this one. Disney even sells the pressed penny storage books, which we also purchased. Perfect.
Make sure your penny is older than 1982. It won't have those silver streaks. The other thing we did was to use a plastic M&M minis container. We then loaded it up with quarters and pennies in order. Pop the lid, pour out the penny and two quarters. When your running around the parks anything that helps you organize better is great.

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