Visit Florida: Smash Pennies

Bentley has a small collection of smashed pennies. Most of them are from Anchorage locations. Mark and I brought him one home from our trip to the American Southwest a year and half ago. However, it's much more fun to go places and smash your own pennies than is to be gifted them as souvenirs of other people's vacations.

So this time we took the children along with us to collect a few smashed pennies. The first penny was from Legoland. The boys chose the same design--a dragon penny. Viva waited until we found a different machine and chose one with minifigure heads on it. Opa tried to talk her into the carousel horse imprint, but she wouldn't go for it. Was that because opa suggested it? Had he picked the heads, would she have picked the horse? I'm never sure with that girl.

I was going to smash a penny at Legoland for my collection (a small and sporadic collection), but I got distracted somehow...something to do with three young children with me? Of course, I would never have visited Legoland without the children. I asked Viva if I could have her penny and she said yes. She's not a collector like her brothers are. (I'm not going to take her penny.)

At the Animal Kingdom we searched out penny smashing machines and found one with great imprints, but it was out-of-order. Viva and Bentley liked the next one we found--a lion, but Jake was holding out for an alligator. We finally located that machine on our way out of the park. The machine wasn't a Disney Animal Kingdom imprint, but just Orlando. I don't think it mattered to Jake.

At the Magic Kingdom penny machines were hard to find. We didn't spend much time actively looking and we only stumbled across one that didn't interest us. We had to settle for what we found on our way out of the park at closing time.

At Hollywood Studios we had to hunt again. I had a list I brought from home where some machines were, but it still took some work to find them. We all found a penny stamp we liked. Hurray!

At Epcot we saw a few machines, but not a lot. However, we knew that it was best to just settle on what you find and call it good. So we did.

I wasn't expecting to find penny machines at Downtown Disney so, of course, we did. One of the machines had some great Disney Princesses so I had Viva stamp all four imprints.