If you are confused about luxury camping (also called glamorous camping or, awkwardly, glamping), you are not alone.

Some of these places, like the “romantic” English shepherds’ huts found on goglamping.net, look like slightly-more-claustrophobic-than-normal ice-fishing shacks. But there seems to be a trend toward more upscale hospitality, where guests are coddled with opulent spa amenities after which they  doze off in tents and yurts fit for a Mongol prince. Consider Montana’s elegant Paws Up ranch (found on the recently upgraded glampinghub.com), where you can enjoy a massage while you wait for room service. There’s even a huge tent that’s equipped with weights, treadmills and an elliptical cross-trainer, for those who don’t understand that you use an elliptical cross-trainer to stay fit so that you might one day go hike the trails of Montana.

Having said our piece on that matter, we’ll reiterate our earlier position that, damn, some these places would be wonderful to visit for a few nights. We like feeling close to the wind, and the sounds of woods, and we enjoy experiencing whatever temperature nature has dealt the world on a given night. We also like comfort. And we’re willing to let someone else cook for us, if they cook well, and we’re guessing most of these places know enough to invest at least as much in their food as their high-thread-count sheets.

(We’re a little suspicious of the ranch’s attention to detail when the website trumpets “rusti ellegance” and activities such as “horsebak riding,” but we’re in no position to throw the first stone.)

Glampinghub.com has other very elegant offerings online, and the site is worth a look if only to while away 20 minutes of Pretend Time. We pretended we might go to cabins at the Macal River Camp at Chaa Creek, Belize ($300 a night) and the “eco-pods” at the Dominican Republic’s Tubagua Plantation Eco Village for a mere $40 nightly. And your fantasy can run amuck at Kenya’s Lewa Safari Camp in the 65,000-acre Lewa Wilderness Trust ($360-$820).

So again we start out writing about glamping with a bad attitude, and we wind up thinking it would be fun. We’ll probably put our money elsewhere, frankly. (For the record, at up to $1,235 a night, we are confident that we will only visit Paws Up during Pretend Time…and it’s not the most expensive glamping site in Montana. A tent at the Ranch at Rock Creek rents out for a chest-clutching $1,900 a night, with a minimum two-night stay.) But we absolutely understand why someone would else would land on glamping as a reasonable diversion.