“You make friends for life when you come here,” fourth time delegation member and president of the Bega/Littleton Sister City Exchange Elfi Smith said on Monday before a morning trip to Eden full of sightseeing and local trivia.

Twenty North American visitors will take in 10 days of sightseeing and cultural exchanges that began with the unveiling of a plaque in Littleton Gardens on Friday and ends with a farewell dinner in Tathra on Saturday night.

“It’s a charm for us to visit the area – we don’t have cows and horses anymore in Littleton,” she said.

Since the relationship began in the 1950s, Littleton has grown to have a population of over 40,000 with its farmland absorbed by houses.

“It still has a small town feel with the roads, but it is connected to Denver these days,” Ms Smith said.

For Ms Smith – who is making the trip with her husband Dwight, a former chancellor of the University of Denver – her relationship with Bega began after being roped in to host members of a visiting delegation in 1988.

“You couldn’t say no to that lady,” she said with a laugh. “I had observed it as an outsider until hosting  and then I got interested.

“I was attracted by the opportunity to meet people and it developed from there.

“I’m a travel agent so travel is in my blood,” she said.

Mr Smith said the introduction of aerospace, defense and advanced technologies company Lockheed Martin to Littleton was seeing the municipality move in new directions.

“There are a lot of engineers these days,” he said.

Also on the trip this year is honor student sophomore at Littleton’s Heritage High Gabi Ahles, who is the Houstoun Waring student ambassador for 2016.

The Bega/Littleton sister city relationship was formed around 55 years ago by then-BDN editor Curly Annabel and his Littleton Independent counterpart Mr Waring.