The Mint

While my family was in town we had the opportunity to visit the Denver Mint.  It was a pretty interesting place.  If you are ever in town I recommend a visit there.  You are not, however, allowed to bring in strollers, purses, diaper bags, cameras or phones with cameras on them, taser guns must stay at home and the same goes for guns and pocket knives.  What can you bring into the Mint, you ask?  Pretty much nothing.  You can bring a wallet that is the size of a man's wallet, but that's it.  So with this post I have no pictures of our lovely field trip.   What did we learn and see?  A lot.  There were old, old coins and artifacts dating back to Biblical times.  We also saw old machines that were used to make money and of course we saw the process of coins being made.  The Denver Mint only makes coins.  They don't make any paper money.  It was pretty interesting to watch it all and to see where our money comes from.  The Denver Mint also stores 16% of our country's gold which is equivalent to 80 billion dollars.  Pretty cool, huh?  All in all it was a quick and informative field trip.  Later that week we found out that a guy at our church is "the man" at the Mint.  We had no idea he worked there.  He oversees everything and he said he could have taken us to the pit to see all the money close up, but not the gold.  That's locked up and out of sight.  Oh, well maybe next time.