For my last two nights and full day on the Yucatan I wanted to be relatively close to the airport in Cancun since my flight to Cuba was in the morning and I'd have to return my rental car. But I also wasn’t keen on going back to Cancun to stay.

I tentatively had staying in Playa del Carmen, one of the resort towns along the coast, in mind . The stretch of coastline south of Cancun is known as the Riviera Maya and is far more built up than I had envisioned. The north-south highway, Route 307, closely parallels the coast from Tulum northward and is lined on its coastal side by the grandiose arched entrances to lavish beachfront mega-resorts. Plus there are plenty of theme parks offering zip-ling, petting zoos, swimming with dolphins, and just about everything else tourists seeking a safe, themed Disneyesque experience could want. It’s a far cry from the small scale beachside jungly resorts I envisioned of the area from things I read.

When I got to Playa del Carmen and got off the highway into the city, I found a significantly-sized, congested seaside resort city. "Wow, this is a lot more like Fort Lauderdale than the Vero Beach type of a place I expected!"  I quickly decided a big beach town with pulsing night clubs, limited parking, and crowds of young Europeans was more than my nerves could handle after nearly two weeks in the relative quiet of the interior Yucatan .

I decided to continue on closer to Cancun to a smaller seaside town named Puerto Morelos. Yes, this is what I was hoping for on my last day at the beach in Mexico. Puerto Morelos is more my idea of a Mexican beach vacation, a small town a few blocks wide strung out along the beach and separated from the mainland by a mangrove estuary. The town has plenty of American tourists, but the scale is much smaller with locally run restaurants and small hotels and apartments and rooms for rent, not a major party place. Maybe I’m getting old or am just asocial, but the big beach resorts I’ve been to in Mexico such as Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, and Cabo San Lucas didn’t much appeal to me. Meanwhile, some of the smaller beach towns I’ve stayed at on my trips such as Puerto Escondido, Todos Santos, Sayulita, and Barra de Navidad were very enjoyable for a few days each. There’s something about them that still feels like Mexico that the bigger places have lost.

Puerto Morelos is best known for having a very good reef just offshore which constitutes a small national park with very good snorkeling and diving . Unfortunately, though, the “norte” was still in force and it was too breezy for snorkeling trips to operate the day I was there. I had little choice but to just hang out on the beach for the day, but that’s really not that bad. Of course, I had plenty of other choices with having a car, such as to drive inland a short distance to some of the many cenotes around. But on my last day in Mexico I wasn’t feeling that enthused for much more in the way of sightseeing and the thought of a quiet day at the beach watching pelicans interested me more.

This quiet time gave me a chance to reflect a little on the last several weeks realizing a trip I’ve long thought about. I find the Mayan world of ruins and modern indigenous culture mixed with that of the Spanish influence in Mexico and Central America to be quite fascinating, but I figured that out previously in Guatemala and Chiapas. I also really think renting a car was the best way to do it since it enabled me to get to remote spots and Mayan sites that would be hard to reach using public transportation or impossible to visit on an organized tour. Independent and with a car is definitely the way to go!