When the couple, there for their 20th visit, commented that it was the first time they had taken the house tour -– one of the staples of the Mohonk Mountain House experience -- I asked what they had been doing all those years. Liz and Dan Gleason from Haddon Heights, NJ replied: “There’s just so much to do all the time, you just can’t fit it all in. Every year, there’s a new surprise. This year, it’s the Smiley family parlor.”

Ask the general populace to name a famous painter, and they’d probably say Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh. Today his paintings command staggering purchase prices, with his Portrait of Dr. Gachet, painted the last year of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, selling for 152 million dollars in today’s currency.

Tucked into a narrow mountain valley in the western foothills of the Bavarian Alps 42 miles southwest of Munich, the village of Oberammergau, circa 1150, opens its arms to thousands of visitors from throughout the world every ten years when the calendar falls on a decimal year.