Last week I was invited by Saturn (corporate motto: "Not just for soccer moms. No, really."), to test drive some of their newer models and spend some time at the Orvis Sandanona Shooting Grounds in Millbrook, NY. A couple of days of blasting stuff into oblivion sounded good after the week I was having.

Sandanona is the oldest permitted shooting club in the country (the main lodge was built when Thomas Jefferson was president), and is located in the Hudson River Valley, about an hour north of New York City. But the quiet and serenity of the grounds (except for the occasional shotgun blast), makes it feel like it's a million miles from anywhere civilized.

They specialize in teaching us stressed-out city guys how to shoot sporting clays (clay discs that are launched from different angles and locations to simulate birds in flight), and how to fly fish. Both pretty good alternatives to your usual pressure-relieving activity, drinking until everyone is your best friend and you can't remember where you live.

After our shooting instructor, Pete, a former military shooting instructor, gave us some basic training and tips - along with all the safety instructions we needed to know to keep us from blowing a hole in anything but the intended targets - he positioned me into one of the stands on the sporting clays course. Bringing a shotgun to my shoulder, calling "pull!" and watching that disc explode into fragments (on the rare occasion I actually hit something), made me focus on nothing but that gun and those clay birds.

If obliterating flying clay discs with a shotgun doesn't do it for you, you can try the more Zen-like quiet of fly fishing. Standing on the bank of a lake, our instructor Bob, showed us the finer points of casting a near-weightless fly out into the middle of the water. Something about the repetition of pulling the rod back, whipping the fly out into the lake, and drawing it slowly back in before whipping it out there again, made it feel almost meditative. The pure sense of calm after an hour or two of casting and recasting made it no big deal whether or not I actually caught a fish. Which I did. A nice sized bass, pictured above.

With a couple of international airports within an hour's drive or less, and classes given year-round, Sandanona is a great way to spend a couple of days releasing some of the week's pressure and stress. And I'm pretty sure if you ask, Pete can put your boss's picture on a few of those clays.

For more info, go to www.orvis.com/sandanona