Destination: Yucatan : Mexico con la Familia : At a modest, peaceful family resort 50 miles from crazed Cancun, kids and parents can vacation together -- but also separately.

I’m more than a little nervous as we drive down the dirt road through the dilapidated white stucco gates that lead to the Akumal Club Caribe. The place doesn’t look like any resort I’ve ever seen, much less one that is rumored to be the latest mecca for in-the-know vacationing American families.

I notice the simple sand paths--no manicured, bougainvillea-lined walks here--and the flaking signs, the dogs wandering freely about, the impoverished village right next door, and I wonder what I’ve gotten us into.

“It is rustic,” admits Laura Bush Wolfe, who runs the 60-room establishment, when we arrive at the reception desk. “That’s why people come here--to get away from civilization.”

Getting away from civilization is right. I’m suddenly acutely aware that I’m alone in Mexico over spring vacation with two children--9-year-old Matt and 7-year-old Regina (my husband couldn’t join us, and I left our 2-year-old home with him)--in a town so small it doesn’t have a gas station or phones that work reliably. There’s a local clinic, and a doctor is on call at the Club Caribe to take care of minor spills and ailments, but it is a remote place with some risk. I also find myself wishing I’d concentrated on Spanish in college instead of French.

Fortunately, the kids are oblivious to my fears. They’re too excited about the potential for adventure here. They jump out of our rented red Volkswagen bug (“the putt- putt car,” as they’ve dubbed it) and immediately set off to hunt for lizards. Later, they go swimming; as the sun sets, I have to drag them out of the ocean to eat dinner.

Akumal (the name is said to mean “Place of the Turtle” in a Mayan dialect) is about 50 miles south of Cancun in the state of Quintana Roo, smack in the middle of the still-sleepy, but rapidly developing, Yucatan coast. Originally part of a coconut plantation, Akumal has long been popular with scuba divers; the town is headquarters for the Mexican Caribbean branch of Cedam International, a nonprofit organization for divers, and there are two dive shops right on the beach. Now, though, it has started to gain a reputation as a kind of alternative to crowded Cancun--a place with the same balmy weather but calmer beaches and not much in the way of night life or daytime frills.

We’ve come to Akumal because, along with four other families from across the country, we’ve signed on for a new-style vacation designed to take the stress out of family travel while leaving the adventure quotient intact. Instead of sticking to the traditional tourist track, we’re trying to give our kids an introduction to Mexico that is somehow more authentic, more realistic, than they’d get from the usual hermetically sealed resort complexes and overgrown beachfront metropolises. What they’ll experience instead is quiet villages, dirt roads, swimming in underpopulated seas and the region’s famed cenotes (or deep natural wells) and even Mayan food.

Our vacation has been arranged by Rascals in Paradise, a San Francisco-based family travel agency. “The idea is that you go somewhere and then feel like you’ve been somewhere,” says Deborah Baratta, who co-founded Rascals in the mid-’80s. “It isn’t for everybody.”

The other families in our group include an engineer and a homemaker, a brewery owner and a teacher, a holistic-health practitioner and a filmmaker, a lawyer and a child therapist, plus their children. We’ve arrived separately, from Ohio, Illinois, Louisiana and California. We all get friendly pretty quickly, though, and by midweek we’re looking out for each other’s kids on the beach and at the pool. We play together on the white-sand, palm-lined beach, alongside big, boisterous families of locals. We eat together at the Lol-Ha, an airy restaurant with a traditional palapa (thatched roof) hung with huge pinatas.

As much fun as it is to do all these things with the kids, Rascals arranges things so that parents get a vacation too--time off from the youngsters, both day and evening. Rascals has assigned 28-year-old Monica DeCoursey to our group. The tall, blond former college athlete and Club Med veteran coordinates activities for the children--there are 11 of them in our group, ranging in age from 1 to 15--and has hired a group of young Mexican baby-sitters to help. (Though Rascals says it has been booking families with infants and toddlers into the Club Caribe for eight years and never had a case of serious illness, some pediatricians advise against taking very young children to remote Mexican locations.) Because our group is small, Monica says that she can be more flexible in her planning, even letting the kids vote on what they’d like to do each day. They tour a tiny tortilla factory in the village one morning, paint hats one afternoon, hunt iguanas on the beach, make papier-mache sculptures. “If the kids get tired of snorkeling or doing art projects, we can always go to the pool,” Monica explains.

Matt and Reggie and I make excursions on our own, too. One day, we drive about two hours to Coba, passing Mayan villages with thatched huts along the way, and climb the pyramid of Nohoch Mul--an imposing structure surrounded not by tour guides and souvenir shops but by dense jungle foliage. Another time, we take a shorter trip to the ruined Mayan fortress city of Tulum, stopping along the way for a dip in an ice-cold, crystal-clear cenote .

Not everyone at Akumal Club Caribe is with the Rascals group. We meet other American families who say they’ve stumbled on the place, and are happy they did. “We were in Cancun first,” says Diane Fuquay, a Seattle pediatrician. “I worry about the kids’ expectations of the world when they’re so catered to at a big resort. They don’t realize there’s a price to be paid for that. This is much better for us, a lot more laid-back.”

Of course, our week is not without glitches. No family vacation ever is. The first day, I’m distressed when Monica leaves Matt and Reggie unsupervised in the pool. Later, she apologizes, blaming a miscommunication. I’m also disappointed that the Rascals activities aren’t more structured. But after a couple of days, it occurs to me that the kids like the lack of structure--that what they really want is a little bit of activity and a lot of time to play in the pool with their new-found friends. It’s their vacation too, I realize.

After seeing how successful the Rascals program has been, the Akumal Club Caribe has started its own children’s program, hiring certified preschool teacher Jeri Beck to run it on selected weeks throughout the year. During those weeks, the two programs often offer shared activities.

Laura Bush Wolfe, whose father--the original developer of Akumal--founded the Club Caribe (and who is herself the mother of a toddler), believes that the resort is particularly attractive to families because of this region’s unusually calm ocean waters. (One of the world’s largest coral reefs serves as a natural tidal barrier.) Another plus, she adds, is the food: All the cooking is done with purified water, and bottled water is placed in each room daily. And of course there’s kid-friendly fare in the restaurant--pizza and burgers as well as fajitas and gazpacho, peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches and fish marinated with Mayan spices.

Rascals in Paradise organizes trips to many destinations besides Akumal. Baratta and her partner Theresa Detchemendy, both longtime travel professionals (and moms), try to offer vacations that will appeal to baby-boomer parents like themselves--seasoned voyagers who don’t want to give up going to “real” places just because they now carry diaper bags instead of backpacks. Some vacations are once-in-a-lifetime experiences--a two-week tour of Australia complete with a stay in the outback, a safari in Africa, a week touring Tahitian islands by canoe. Others are closer to home--ski weeks in Telluride, rafting in Idaho, bike tours in Canada, diving in the Caribbean.

These trips tend to be addictive. As one of our group tells me on our last night, “I think it’s going to be hard to do a family vacation and not do something like this again.”

Personally, I’m already saving up for Tahiti.

GUIDEBOOK

How to Loll at Akumal

Getting there: Mexicana has nonstop flights five days a week from Los Angeles to Cancun, the nearest airport to Akumal. Continental, American Airlines and Aeromexico offer connecting flights. Through Dec. 15, lowest round-trip fares are $455 midweek, $507 on weekends.

Getting around: Rental cars in Cancun, about an hour’s drive from Akumal, cost about $350 per week for a vehicle with manual transmission and no air conditioning; cars with automatic transmission and air conditioning can be triple the price. (Because the taxi ride to and from Cancun is expensive and the cab might not be equipped with seatbelts, Rascals recommends renting a car, though it isn’t essential.)

Rascals in Paradise: A week’s program for a family of four at the Akumal Club Caribe, including accommodations for seven nights, breakfast and dinner daily, a full-time baby-sitter and all activities, ranges from $1,880 for a standard oceanfront hotel room to $2,920 for a two-bedroom villa. Air and rental car arrangements are additional. For information or reservations on Akumal and other Rascals in Paradise destinations, call (800) 872-7225.

On your own: It is possible to book rooms directly at the Akumal Club Caribe. Lodgings range from $77 a night for very modest bungalow rooms, to $95 for the beachfront rooms we had, to $300 for beautifully decorated three-bedroom condos with private beach and pool. Akumal’s own children’s program, which is available on selected dates throughout the year, accommodates preschoolers in the morning, grade-school children in the afternoon and all age groups in the evening. The cost is $10 for morning or afternoon sessions and $5 for the evening (not including the cost of dinner). For information and reservations, call (800) 351-1622.

Another hotel on the beach at Akumal is Las Casitas Akumal, which has no special children’s programs but does offer 14 two-bedroom villas at prices ranging $115-$165, depending on the season. For information and reservations, call (800) 525-8625.