NUEVO VALLARTA, Mexico — Decisions can be tough to make at Marival Resort & Suites: Margarita or martini? Steak or calamari? Tennis or climbing wall?

All without pulling a peso from your pocket.

Marival is a giant all-inclusive resort, a sort of dry-land cruise ship where you pay one upfront fee for lodging, food, drink and entertainment.

Gasp if you will, reader of Conde Nast Traveler, but for a vacation in a foreign country with four children, this is the only way to go.

Last March, my wife and I abruptly decided our family needed a real vacation, not a short drive to visit relatives. We had been buried in work. Our teenagers had become strangers. And our grade schoolers were going stir crazy from the Spokane winter. An Internet search introduced us to the concept of all-inclusive resorts, which I initially turned my nose up at. But a look at the Web sites of some of these resorts quickly changed my mind.

Without knowing anything about the place, we settled on Marival, a sprawling 495-room Meditarranean-themed resort on the hotel-lined beach in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, just north of the famous vacation city of Puerto Vallarta. It was advertised as family friendly.

Booking a room was easy. We were also warned to make our dinner reservations at the same time, to make sure we could get into the better restaurants.

A resort shuttle picked us up at the airport, and we gazed at the Bay of Banderas as we drove along the palm-lined highway to the resort.

The place was gorgeous, open and airy. We had two rooms, which were small but functional, overlooking the lighted tennis courts (we play tennis as a family and courts were mandatory).

We immediately rushed down to the beach, well-stocked with chairs and umbrellas.

My 10-year-old preferred the huge swimming pools, which were warm and had swim-up bars. I began sampling tropical drinks, and we all got too much sun as we splashed in the warm bay.

Then we went to our rooms, showered and dressed up for dinner. Marival has four formal restaurants — serving Italian, Mexican, steak and "international" cuisine. To get into these places you need reservations, and it is too late to get them once you get there. They also ask that you dress up a bit. Otherwise there is a huge buffet restaurant and snack bars scattered throughout the grounds.

The first night we ate at the international place, located outside in a center courtyard. The service and food were good. You could order anything off the menu and anything you wanted to drink. There was no bill at the end.

Afterward, we walked on the beach, took in the evening song-and-dance show put on by the hotel, and went to bed.