We're blossoming numismatists.

We traveled to the Old Dominion early this week. It was a short stay, but refreshing for a few reasons. First, it is always nice to be in Virginia. Such a great place that may require its own blog entry to truly explain its greatness. More importantly though, we were able to catch up with family who we have not seen since Thanksgiving. It is always good to catch up with the family. We spent a good portion of that time with my grandparents eating out at the Beach Pub, hearing new tidbits about grandpa's life and developing our recent infatuation with numismatics, or coin collecting to the average coin jangler. Actually it has become more my grandpa’s new hobby.

“You won’t be able to find these (the state quarters) in two years,” according to my grandpa. Not that I doubt my grandpa, because he can do and has done a lot of things, but he tends to make statements like this on a frequent basis. Melanie got a taste of this the last time we saw him when he gave me a “brand new” wallet and she found a random key in it from its previous owner. Back to the point, grandpa has been collecting the new state quarters and its turned into quite a production. We brought two rolls of quarters with us from New Orleans so that he could spread out his source of quarters. He took us into his office area and showed us his numismatic skills. First he showed us his four almost completed collections, then broke open the rolls and started sorting. He sorted the quarters with the eagles on them from the state quarters and set them aside. Then he took out his enormous magnifying glass and started sorting them according to the different mints from which they came. He was specifically looking for quarters from the lucky Denver mint. He pretty much had all the quarters in the set from the Philadelphia mint, but being on the east coast makes it more difficult to find the Denver mint quarters. He found thirteen in the eighty that we brought him. It was a good day.

Over night we became collectors ourselves. We have somewhat of a head start from grandpa’s efforts, but we started looking for the state quarters as soon as we left. We visited a friend who works in a dentist office and we went through her change jar. We received quarters at some point last night in our five-hour layover in D.C. and went to a payphone to see if we could get different quarters if we hit the coin return. Melanie implemented the same strategy today with the cold drink machine at work and hit the coin return until she got state quarters; jack pot!

Who would have thought we would be numismatists? I think it will be a fleeting hobby, but for now we’re enjoying it because grandpa enjoys it and I think that is more than enough reason.