...on our excursion to Washington in early August, one of the mildly amusing things that accidently occurred was finding one of those machines that will make an imprint on a penny. It was located at 'Ye Olde Curosity Shoppe', which is worth a trip all by itself. Sort of creepy in a 'Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum' sense, but pretty much un-explainable and indescribable, so you have to actually witness it to know what is before your disbelieving eyes: Stuff like the two headed calf, and the preserved 'merman' that appears to be half fish and half monkey skeleton. Creepers.
The 'Smash a Penny' machine, found in random places anywhere tourist traps might lure you in. It requires 51 cents: put your penny in the machine, pick the design you want, and insert two quarters. Turn the handle and out falls your flattened penny, now in an oval shape, with a design of some local attraction. I have been carrying my Seattle penny since it came clinking out of the machine full of gears and levers. So it has been riding around in my pocket with change for nearly a month.
I have at least a dozen other ones that I have accumulated over the years from a variety of places we have traveled. Family vacations, trips to places of historic note or just tourist-ing.
Myrtle Beach State Park, SC.
National Zoo (it has an elephant on it)
Children's Museum, Washington DC (looks like it has a figure from the 'cootie' game)
Biloxi, Mississippi (lighthouse that sits in the middle of the street)
Wakulla State Park, near Tallahassee FL
USS Alabama, retired aircraft carrier
Aquarium of the Americas, NO, LA
Blue Ridge, GA,
McCaysville, GA
Frontier Land, Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, Orlando, FL
and the one that has been in my pocketa for a month: Seattle, WA, an image of the Space Needle,a well-known local landmark left over from when the town hosted a World's Fair years ago.
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