Children Are Wonderful, as Are Getaways Without Them : Destinations: For a kid-free vacation, plan around school holidays. Also, here are four inns and retreats just for adults.

The spotlight seems to be aimed at family travel these days, but what if you want to go someplace without your kids, or anybody else’s, around? Sure, you love the little tykes, but it only takes two or three youngsters to shatter the quiet when you are dozing contentedly beside the pool.

Obviously, children should be allowed to enjoy the educational advantages of travel, but there are good reasons to leave them behind occasionally. Romance, for example, jumps quickly to mind; by definition, a romantic getaway--to celebrate a wedding anniversary, perhaps--should exclude young folks.

But how do you find child-free destinations? It isn’t easy, but it can be done.

Bookstores today are full of guides featuring family vacations, but I’ve yet to find one devoted to holidays for adults only. Even guides purporting to highlight romantic excursions seem oblivious to the child issue. At best, an occasional lodging guide, such as Ian Keown’s “Caribbean Hideaways” (Prentice Hall, $16), notes whether a hotel or an inn accepts or discourages children as guests.

Adults wishing to vacation in an adults-only setting may quite understandably think they are being overlooked by the travel industry. Nowadays, children are joining their parents in the unlikeliest places. Once big-city business hotels catered primarily to grown-ups on business. Now many of the national chains offer children’s programs to attract family travelers, and lobbies, dining rooms and swimming pool areas are filled with youthful chatter. Las Vegas, America’s casino-gambling capital, is grasping for the family trade. Awhile back, I received a letter from an older woman just back from a Caribbean cruise. She had found herself on a ship full of youngsters on school break, and complained that they dominated the pool from dawn to dusk. Next time she will book a ship catering to passengers her age.

I’m not blaming the children here; they may not realize when their natural exuberance is annoying other guests. Guidebook author Keown chastises their parents, who, he writes, may be “trying to have a vacation themselves and have allowed family discipline to break down until it reaches the point where it can be restored only by a public shouting match--usually on the beach or around the pool.”

To elude children, the most basic rule is to vacation when families don’t--and this means avoiding weekends and school holidays whenever possible. I regularly plan ski trips for midweek during a non-holiday month (January or March), when lift tickets are cheaper and the average age of skiers on the slopes is closer to mine. You also might have to pay extra for more upscale lodgings and leave the budget hotels and motels to families.

Beyond this, there are certain categories of lodgings--such as bed-and-breakfast inns and couples-only resorts--and types of travel, adventure trips among them, where children are rare or nonexistent. Obviously, programs aimed at seniors, such as Elderhostel, do not include children. Also, you can research child-free getaways by checking guidebooks (the good ones note restrictions on children), getting references from family and friends and by questioning tourism officials.

In recent years, my wife and I have stayed at numerous very different lodgings where preteens are discouraged, most of which we found by doing our own research. These include four, which I recommend highly--for their scenic settings and the high quality of the service as well as for the blissful quiet.

Examples of what is available include Ventana (408-667-2331), a small, wonderfully relaxing hillside lodge on Northern California’s Big Sur Coast; Jamaica Inn (809-974-2514), a sophisticated inn on a lovely private beach near Ocho Rios in Jamaica; the Flying A Guest Ranch (800-678-6543), which enjoys a magnificent meadow-and-pond setting at the foot of Wyoming’s Gros Ventre Mountains near Pinedale; and Hastings House (604-537-2362), a posh Tudor-style hideaway on British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island between Victoria and Vancouver.

All four have good reasons to restrict children. Ventana offers clothing-optional outdoor hot tubs and a clothing-optional sunning deck. The beach at Jamaica Inn is topless for those who choose. Guests at the Flying A spend much of the day on horseback on sometimes energetic rides, and at night they gather for conversation and cocktails before dinner. Hastings House is richly appointed with antiques, paintings and other expensive furnishings that could suffer from rambunctious youngsters. You really have to be a little older to appreciate these things.