Disney Pressed Pennies

My kids have collected Pressed Pennies for years. We started it when my daughter was little and we were looking for a way to do inexpensive souvenirs. Pressed Pennies are great! They cost 51 cents, there are usually a few options to choose from, and you can get Pressed Penny Passports to keep them all organized. When we were getting ready for our first Disney trip, I found a site that listed the hundreds of locations of the Pressed Penny machines at Disney World. Since I knew we would be collecting a lot of them, we decided to get the kids Disney Pressed Penny Passports so that they wouldn't fill up their other Penny Passports with just Disney ones. The Disney Passports were about $10 each. I had also found a tip about using Mini M&M tubes to keep the quarters and pennies in so that they were organized and ready to go when we needed them. The tubes are the perfect size for quarters. In the tubes I put 2 quarters and 1 penny, 2 quarters and 1 penny, and so on until the whole tube was filled. I had enough room for about 15 sets of quarters and pennies. I also found a Disigner on the DIS boards who makes labels for the M&M tubes. I printed the labels on a sheet of label paper, cut them out, and attached them to our tubes.

The Disigner who made the labels for the Mini M&M tubes also made labels for Mentos tubes. I didn't even know that Mentos gum came in tubes. I went to the store and found Mentos tubes in the check out aisle, and they happen to be the perfect shape to hold the Pennies once they were pressed. So, I couldn't resist making tubes for the Pressed Pennies. I decided not to haul both sets of tubes to the parks each day. I left the Pressed Penny tubes in the resort and just kept the Pressed Pennies in the M&M tubes or in a pocket until we got back to the resort.

Now, because I didn't want to be doing nothing but looking for pennies to press in the parks, I printed off the Pressed Penny list (http://www.presscoins.com) and decided ahead of time which machines we were going to visit. Since I didn't write them down after our first trip, I had to go through the kids' passports from the first trip and check off the ones we already had. Then I wrote down the locations of the machines we were going to hit this time and kept it in my itinerary notebook. I also didn't want the kids to get duplicates so I would not let the kids pick the same penny from the same machine. They all had to get different ones. This worked out perfectly because each machine usually had 3 choices. They each picked a different penny from the machine and we were all set. I haven't figured out what to do for next time when Drake will be old enough to collect them and the machines will still only have 3 choices!