Mt. Vintage Plantation and Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia - photo gallery

Mt. Vintage Plantation and Golf Club is way out in the sticks about halfway between Augusta, Ga. and Aiken, S.C., and about 165 years from the here and now. You enter the old clubhouse, built in 1840 by a cotton planter named Thomas Lewis Shaw, to find centuries-old, wide-plank, heart of pine floors and walls and two gas fireplaces burning to ward off the late fall, Carolina chill.

The historic plantation itself is in historic Edgefield County, where General Sherman missed some of the oldest historical records in the state when he burned the courthouse on his bloody march to the sea.

Now, it's mainly fox hounds and golfers, and the only dueling is between the golfers and the golf course, which winds up, down and through the hills of the old plantation. There is considerable elevation change here, but your main challenge on the course would be the greens. They are sloped, undulating and tough to negotiate in normal conditions, and when the winter weather makes them slick as the hood of a wet Volkswagen, it doubles the fun.