A Penny for Your Thoughts: Portable Souvenir!

Leslie Dinunzio
12.3.20

If you’re like me, when you travel you often have a special souvenir to bring home from each destination. Sometimes they’re meaningful, sometimes they’re disposable/consumable and sometimes they’re tchotchkes. Personally, my family has a couple items we like to purchase to remember where we’ve been to. One of those items are pressed pennies! This is a super inexpensive way to gather memories from where you’re visiting on property. If you’re not familiar with pressed pennies, it’s pretty simple. The machine basically takes a penny and squishes/flattens it, imprinting a new design on the now flat and oval-shaped coin.

Pressed penny machine are pretty much everywhere on Disney property! You can find them in every hotel and in each park. There is even a machine in the Disney Cruise Line terminal at Port Canaveral. They’re almost all different with several penny options per machine. It would take a very long time to collect them all, that’s for sure. We usually get a couple new pennies per trip. Once you start this collection, you’ll notice that many non-Disney touristy places also have a pressed penny machine.

Some of the gift shops sell pressed penny books which are an easy way to store your pile of pennies. They’re small, they’re compact, and the pennies won’t fall out. And they’re all in one neat place. We filled our first book which was from Disney World, our second book which we found at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii, and are waiting for our own next trip to purchase a third book.

Penny machines now cost $1 per coin, cash or card. Caveat, they used to cost 51c (two quarters and your own penny) but those machines are pretty much gone. The positive is you no longer need to carry around exact change.

I’d love to help discuss a trip to a Disney destination (or anywhere else!) and can be reached at Leslie@wishesfamilytravel.com