#Tippe'sTravels: Collecting Smashed Pennies: Finding Things To Do On A Trip

All my closest friends and family members know that one of my favorite things to do when I travel is to collect smashed pennies (or smashed coins). You know what I'm talking about. We all see those kitschy tall, skinny machines at the zoo or any theme park or even
random tourist shops.

I remember begging my parents for 51 cents to get a smashed penny every time we went to the Honolulu Zoo as a child, only to lose the penny shortly afterward. Then, when I was 16, I took a trip to Cedar Point, the Roller Coaster Capital of the World, while visiting relatives in Ohio over the summer. As a poor high school student, I couldn't afford any of the overpriced souvenirs in the park, and while getting a smashed penny is affordable, I wasn't sure it would be worth it if I was just going to lose it anyway. It was just my luck that in one of the gift shops I had discovered a Cedar Point themed "Penny Passport" which had slots for 36 smashed pennies and happened to be only $3.95. I have been an avid smashed penny collector ever since that day that I discovered a place to put my pennies.

Collecting smashed pennies was my way of showing where I have been, especially since I mostly traveled domestically at first. You can't get a stamp for visiting any particular city or state, but chances are good that that place has a smashed penny machine somewhere! I love my little collection which serves as a record of many of the places I have traveled to. It's an affordable hobby because even today, penny passports never cost more than $10. I always try to buy passports with neat designs rather than the ones that have the simple and plain "Penny Passport" label printed on the cover.

San Francisco's Chinatown

One of my favorite things about collecting smashed pennies is that you stumble across the machines in the most random places, and if you want to deliberately find a machine, the places that have them are almost always worth visiting. I have discovered a helpful website which I consult before every single trip, domestic or international, to help me find machines. I have never been disappointed yet. It lists penny machines for each state (and even country) by city and address. On road trips, I like to see if there are any locations on my route. When I was driving from Utah to Denver two years ago, I decided to stop at the Red Rock Amphitheatre and in Vail at the Ski and Snowboard Museum just for the pennies, and both times I discovered some really neat places. For my trip to South Africa this month, I will be consulting this website to find places to get more smashed coins. All the places that have machines sound amazing. I prefer to collect coins and not tokens, so you can click the picture or read the description of each reported machine to see what they have. This is crowdsourcing at its best! (Okay, maybe not, but I love it!) Here is what it looks like for that trip:

There is a story behind each smashed coin that I have collected. I try to get pennies that are truly representative of the places I visit. My favorite styles often include city skylines and local architecture. Sometimes I like a lot of the designs available, so I'll come home with 4 or 5 or 8 pennies from one place. Other times I won't like any design, but I still get one to represent that trip.

Pennies from St. Augustine, FL & Washington DC with some Euros from Rome and a Won from Seoul

Here are a few of my favorites:

I love this penny I got the very first time I drove the PCH from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We drove across the famous Bixby Bridge and I was able to get this penny in the visitor's center at a campsite in Big Sur even though I didn't camp out there.

I love the design of this one that I got in Charlotte, NC when I was visiting one of my cousins who lived in downtown. As a city planner, I absolutely love cities, and I love how the downtown skyline is represented here.

This one is one of my all time favorites because this is where my parents got married. It's the Laie, Hawaii LDS Temple. As a Mormon from Hawaii, this represents so much in my life. I think it would be really neat if I could afford to have a smashed penny machine whenever the heck I get married that had an image of the temple that I end up getting married in. But that's wishful thinking.

This penny is an example of a design that I don't particularly like because you can't tell what it is! It says Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde so you know where it's from (Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado), but the design doesn't look like the familiar cliff dwellings everyone knows. But still, it's a penny depicting the ancient Anasazi ruins and I think that is very cool.

I like this one of the Seattle skyline, "The Emerald City," that I got at the base of the Space Needle because it shows the city skyline so well. I am a nerd for all things city and urban!

I got these two pennies the first time I visited Zion National Park in southern Utah. I supported a team on the Red Rock Relay, a ~200 mile 12-person running relay from Brian Head to Zion, and the day after the race I got to hike The Narrows. It was an absolutely stunning hike, and that entire weekend is the reason why I started running. Ever since then I have run 6 half marathons and 1 marathon.

This one is just a cool penny from home that represents Hawaii so well. It's the King Kamehameha statue that is in front of a government building on King Street near Punchbowl in downtown. I used to catch the bus in front of this statue all the time. (Sorry it's sideways...I will work on rotating these pictures later).

These pennies also represent home to me. I grew up a few miles away from Pearl Harbor and went there often as a kid. These pennies are an image of the actual USS Arizona Memorial and the actual plaque that represents the spot where Japan surrendered ending World War II on the USS Missouri, the Mighty Mo.

And this penny is one of my all time favorites because it depicts an Okapi from the San Diego Zoo. The Okapi is one of my favorite animals. It's so quirky! It looks like a deer, zebra, and giraffe all at the same time.

When I discovered that a handful of other countries also have smashed coin machines, I fell even more in love with this hobby of mine. A good friend from graduate school had spent a couple of weeks in Mexico and brought me back a smashed peso! Every time I have traveled abroad since then, I have sought out my own smashed coins. In Canada, they have machines stocked with American pennies. In Europe, there are smashed Euro machines everywhere. When I was in Thailand and South Korea, one of the few machines that exist were on the top of tall buildings. In Bangkok, I got to visit the observatory at the top of the tallest building in the country in order to get my penny. In Seoul, I visited the Sky Art Gallery at the top of the 63 Building which had a really awesome Beatles exhibit where their machine was located. I would have never gone to any of these places if it were not for the machines. This is just one example of how a fun little hobby can help you see the world.