I had a short trip recently back to New Jersey for my work anniversary. There were a bunch of different events going on while I was there, but after the work day I wanted to try and find some new elongated coins. About an hour north on the Turnpike I found myself at the American Dream Mega Mall.

Now this place has quite the history to it. For as long as I lived in New Jersey it was always in development, then delays, then bankruptcy, and multiple owners. It seems like it was never going to open. Then as fate would have it, once I moved out of the state to Florida it finally opened at least most of it opened.

This place is huge, and includes an indoor ice rink, and indoor ski hill, water park, hundreds of retail stores, and aquarium and the Nickelodeon Universe indoor theme park.

The pictures don’t do this place justice. It’s a giant location with a glass ceiling that fills the space with natural light. Inside are different areas of the park all themed around different Nickelodeon shows.

Each area was also for a specific age group. Most of the attractions here I think would be for younger guests, but there were couple roller coasters for older visitors.

The pathways were nice and wide accommodating larger crowds. Thankfully during my visit later in the evening there weren’t too many people.

This was a big place but it was still amazing to see how they were able to cram so many different attractions inside.

I wish I had more time to actually ride some of the coasters, unfortunately time was not on my side and I had a whole lot of pressed pennies to try and find.

The theme park had four different penny machines and they were all located right next to each other just outside of the restrooms near the Rugrats Carousel. At first glance these machines looked fantastic, with a nice acrylic cabinet, plenty of neon lights and even built in LCD screens. I could have done without the large wheel to press the coins as I just find it kind of cumbersome. However as I would soon find out these machines were a nightmare.

I was eventually able to press all of the penny designs, four from each machine for a total of 16 pennies. The issue is that these machines cost $1.99 for each design, and cash is not accepted. It’s credit / debit card only but then their system only allows you to use the same card 4-5 times then that card is locked and can’t be reused. I had heard about this issue from another collector and decided to bring a few pre-loaded visa gift cards to help but even then I was running into issues and had to start using my own personal credit cards and even debit card just to get all of them. I can’t imagine there is that much fraud happening with these machines, but it was a major inconvenience for me and I’m sure anyone else that wants to try and collect all of them.

The theme park was fun to walk through and visit, hopefully I can go again on a future trip and actually try some of the attractions. I was glad to get the pennies but it was such a terrible experience using those machines that even if they release new designs I probably wouldn’t bother. I still had a little bit of time before the mall was closing and there were a few more penny machines to try and use so stay tuned. Keep on Pressing

---