In my last post I told you about visiting the Denver Mint. But on the same day we visited the Mint, the Denver Coin Expo was just getting started. Billed as “One of the largest and oldest coin shows in the Rocky Mountains!”, it did end up being really big at around 140 tables and a whole lot of people attending.
We got out of the Mint at around 9:00am and the expo started at 10:00am. While we weren’t the first ones in the door (mostly because I missed a turn and had to drive through construction traffic to get to the parking lot) we must have been pretty close. The expo was going to last three days but we only had one as we had to go home the next morning. So we had a lot of coins to look at in a short time.
Since both of us are new collectors we spent the day learning about coins more than we did buying them. The dealers at the show were great. There were a few that didn’t seem like they wanted to be there but for the most part everyone was very friendly.
Riley went off on his own and made his own deals while I sat at a few tables looking through discount coin bins and talking to some great people. I especially enjoyed talking with Tom and Sandy from Tom and Sandy’s Coins. they live in Huntsville, TX but apparently come to the Denver show often.
While the expo was a great treasure hunt it was also very educational. We learned about collecting coins, sure, but we also heard mini lectures from several ancient coin dealers about the history surrounding some of their specimens. Other dealers taught us about events surrounding some of the earlier US coins we were looking at.
We didn’t spend very much money at the show since we really didn’t know what we wanted to collect. Now that the show is over, however, we have a much better idea of what interests us (and what we can afford).
My favorite coin from the show: 1866 Shield Nickel
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