I have lived in New Jersey for almost 20 years and only now have I been able to go and meet Lucy the Elephant.  But not just meet her, I was also able to climb inside her and check out a museum dedicated to her.  Confused yet?  That’s okay I’ll explain before you call the ASPCA on me.  This is one of those famous landmarks in New Jersey that you hear about but is kind of out of the way and not always top on the priority list.  It’s about 2 miles outside of Atlantic City which I visit a few times year but I’m usually in a rush to get to the casino or in a rush to get the heck out of there.  This time however I set our GPS directly to Lucy’s coordinates so we could check her out.

As I mentioned above Lucy is located in Margate New Jersey which is only a few minutes outside Atlantic City.  She is a six-story tall elephant that was originally constructed in 1881 in an effort to sell real estate in the area, and also attract tourists.  There are guided tours you can take that will review Lucy’s amazing history, and will also take you inside her structure.

On the ground floor there is a gift shop which can be accessed without paying the admission to enter Lucy or take the guided tour.  Inside the gift shop as you might have guessed there is a penny machine.  These were designs that I have had on my to-do list for years and was only finally able to acquire.

The machine was working great, unfortunately the gift shop is a little small and if there are more than a handful of people inside it can make moving around a little difficult.  Eventually I was able to make may way over to the machine and press the coins.

There were four designs available: Lucy the Elephant, Ocean City NJ, NJ Beaches and Battleship New Jersey.  I’m not really sure why the Battleship design was available here since it’s actually located in Camden, NJ about an hour away from Ocean City, but in any case it is a nice design.

The visit overall didn’t take too long, in all honesty it took much longer to get there than it did to enjoy the attraction.  But it was still cool to finally see Lucy up close and in person.  So if you find yourself in Atlantic City having a run of bad luck in the Casino take a quick trip over to see Lucy, press some new pennies and maybe your luck will change.