Finally I bit the bullet. Checked myself into a handsome hunting lodge and made sure I also had a reservation a few nights later at a genteel-looking country resort that also features sporting clays and real hunting.

They’re both in Georgia and I am too, but in all my 60 years I’ve never held a rifle. Any gun for that matter other than skeet shooting at the Jersey shore my growing-up years.

People I know and people I love hunt often and wish they could more frequently, but I’ve always been an outsider in those conversations.

Guess I still am after missing every target despite the guidance of a kind and affirming instructor.

What I do now know with assurance is that hunting lodges and inns are good-looking places with loads of luxuries and outstanding chefs.

Helps if you like to eat quail, but I experienced many courses at breakfast and dinner with wide variety worth ordering again.

Flat Creek Lodge is 90 miles from Savannah or a three-hour drive southeast of Atlanta requiring some state roads. Henderson Village is directly off Interstate 75, sort of midway between Atlanta and the Florida line.

Linens are luxurious, grounds groomed beautifully, porches feature rocking chairs and big sweeping views and new experiences are as plentiful as is calm time to simply be.

That’s the way it is each place even though they are strikingly different in their construction.

Flat Creek’s cabins open up to a lake with views from the bedroom windows and a back porch that lets you stand right at the water’s edge. Only trouble is, that requires wanting to get out of the massive wood rockers.

Big burly hunting men could be comfortable in these cabins and I was too even without camouflage clothes and a gun to leave by the front door. Spaces are big, furniture is massive, stones and wood dominate.

So does metal sculpture. Since I wasn’t going into the woods in search of wild boar or even gentler dove, bob white quail or pheasant, I had plenty of animal contact with handsome, tall-as-I-am iron works of birds, rabbits, possum, deer, turkeys and more wildlife around the yards and on top of all the buildings as weather vanes.

Distinctive skyline out here — I never tired of noticing the next creature on a rooftop.

Hunters ride into those woods in Unimogs, formerly used as NATO troop carriers and fitted with Mercedes Benz engines. Flat Creek Lodge has six of them, plenty for the hunt and for visitors like me who want to experience the bounce on a tour of some of the 2,000 acres.

Much is timber, tall pines in this part of the world, which owners Steve and Caroline Harless started purchasing in 1995. Spring-fed ponds and lakes take up 240 acres where folks catch large mouth bream, bluegill and crappie.