BY Minneapolis Star Tribune

Alfredo, a slight fellow clasping a clipboard to his chest, closed his eyes while the portly, sunburned woman screeched into his face.

"You can't do this to us! What is my husband going to do? He has to work tomorrow!" Her husband -- lean, leathery and bent like a spoon -- listened passively with a frown.

"He won't be going to work tomorrow," Alfredo said flatly during a pause in her tirade.

It was 4 p.m. on a Saturday at Cancun International Airport last April. I already had accepted my fate. A pleasant weeklong vacation in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, had ended, but my charter flight home from Cancun was going to be delayed, at least by 12 hours. Our plane was broken, Alfredo said, and Ryan International -- the carrier -- was sending a new one from Miami. Eventually.

Most of the passengers received this news as I had -- with quiet desperation -- but a few threw conniption fits. Several others gave up, buying new tickets on a half-empty Sun Country flight rather than taking their chances.

In my career as a travel reporter, and in my life as a Minnesotan, I've been on charter flights at least 20 times. When you buy a charter ticket, you get a low price, but you also get fewer guarantees. Most of the time, I've never noticed the difference. But sometimes I have. Such was the case last April, when the bookends of the trip generated delays and a lot of drama, while the middle part, in somnolent Puerto Morelos, provided exactly the kind of sun-soaked eventlessness I was seeking.

Puerto Morelos is just a few miles south of Cancun, but a thousand miles away in pace and attitude. There are no giant hotels, no busy streets and no beer-swilling donkeys braying outside barn-sized discos. With my wife and several friends, I stayed at a small hotel whose owners asked not to be mentioned. They like things the way they are in Puerto Morelos. No more people needed or wanted, in their view.

I can understand that. In Puerto Morelos, you can walk anywhere you need to go. The beach is straight and long, and while there were always people around -- especially vacationing Mexicans -- there always seemed to be plenty of open spots for my towel.

The plaza is still the community's heart. The open-sided Catholic church anchors one side, the grocery store another, the third is lined with cafes. The fourth side is open to the marina, where the fishing boats tie up. In the evenings, the benches are full of young couples and families eating ice cream cones. Hard to believe that only 30 minutes away, the unbridled debauchery of spring break was in full fever.

Puerto Morelos is surrounded by national park lands and waters, which is why it remains relatively unscathed by the tsunami of development inundating the rest of the Yucatan's east coast. During the course of the week, I went scuba diving (clear water, lots of sea life, including several big green turtles). I went to a Mayan-style sweat bath in the jungle (where the American-expat proprietor lives as far off the grid as he can). And I spent an afternoon swimming in the silky, cool water of one of the underground caves known as cenotes that underlie much of the Yucatan Peninsula. (The water in cenotes radiates a luminous shade of blue that I've seen nowhere else in nature.)

In the afternoons, I walked to the beach and sat down to read a good novel. I'd look at the page, then I'd look at the sea. Brown pelicans glided by at intervals, eyeing the wave break for easy meals. Occasionally, when an oblivious fish had been spotted, the pelican would pull up in midair, fold all its ungainly angles together into a beautiful hunter's arrow, and dive into the surf, emerging moments later with a fish thrashing in its gullet.

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