St. Lucia is known as one of the most romantic Caribbean islands, making it a particularly attractive vacation spot for honeymooners. Pat and I have been married for 31 years, thus disqualifying us as newlyweds, but we still managed to enjoy our one-week stay on this rustic, volcanic island that’s about halfway between Martinique and St. Vincent.

It was a bone-chilling 15 degrees when we drove to Newark airport at 5 a.m. last month and 85 sunny degrees when we landed in St. Lucia at 1:10 p.m. local time. A promising start to our vacation, even though our rental jeep wasn’t at the airport due to a mixup about the date of our arrival. (The owner of the rental agency arranged for a driver to take us to our Airbnb, where they delivered our Suzuki Jimny that evening.)

Our three-room villa on the west coast of the island overlooked Marigot Bay, a scenic spot that was featured in the 1967 film “Doctor Doolittle” and the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie in 2003. We ate lunch one day at Doolittle’s restaurant, which has giant photo displays from the movie featuring Anthony Newley and Rex Harrison, who behaved so badly on the set that he was nicknamed Tyrannosaurus Rex.

We snorkeled and kayaked in the bay, which was filled with boats of all sizes and shapes. The largest was a sleek mega yacht that was probably owned by some tech billionaire or Arab sheikh. There also was an old, colorfully painted sailing ship at the dock that doubles as a 15-room Airbnb. It’s operated by JJ, a local businessman who seems to own half of Marigot Bay, including a restaurant, bar, cottages, a ferry service and a huge chunk of land.

On our first full day in St. Lucia, we drove north to Pigeon Island National Landmark, site of an 18th-century British fort. The 44-acre park includes the ruins of stone barracks and other military buildings once used to protect the island from French invasion. We hiked along a steep, rocky trail to the top of 330-foot Signal Peak, where you can see the French island of Martinique about 22 miles away on a clear day. (The British and French fought for control of St. Lucia throughout the 1700s. Today, the island is an independent country that is part of the British Commonwealth.)

The 15-mile trip from Marigot Bay to Pigeon Island took an excruciating 75 minutes. I’m normally a fast driver, but driving on St. Lucia is a hair-raising experience caused by hairpin turns, crater-sized potholes and narrow roads that can barely accommodate two cars heading in opposite directions. Because it’s a former British colony, motorists drive on the left side and must avoid deep drainage ditches bordering the roads that are capable of destroying any car that strays a little too wide. I rarely drove more than 25 mph and often had to slow to a crawl while maneuvering around tight corners or dodging potholes.

The northern part of the island, including Gros Islet and Rodney Bay, is a haven for well-heeled tourists who stay at all-inclusive resorts like Sandals that can cost more than $1,000 per night. We only spent one day there because most of the places we wanted to visit —the Pitons, Sulphur Springs, Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens and Sugar Beach — were located in the Soufriere area near the southeast coast of the island, which is 27 miles long and 14 miles wide with a population of 180,000.

I wanted to watch my Philadelphia Eagles play the Washington Commanders in the NFC championship game, so we stopped at a sports bar in Rodney Bay that shows U.S. sports. We ate a late lunch there, but it got so crowded that we decided to drive back to our villa to watch the game, in which the Eagles stomped the Commanders to reach the Super Bowl. (Shortly after the game ended, we lost our internet TV service due to a heavy rainstorm. Though late January is part of the dry season, there were brief showers most days that quickly turned into bright sunshine.)

The island’s most notable geographic landmarks are Gros Piton and Petit Piton, twin volcanic spires that rise majestically along the western Caribbean coast. Both are challenging to climb and both require guides, but Petit is considered more difficult despite being slighter shorter at 2,438 feet. Though I managed to summit Mount Kilimanjaro seven years ago at age 65, Pat convinced me that my serious mountain climbing days were over and that Gros Piton was less likely to cause permanent damage.

A wise choice, as it turned out, because I only made it halfway up. Constantly climbing over, around and in between huge rocks and thick tree roots made by neuropathy-stricken feet feel like I was walking on hot coals. Besides, everyone said the view from the halfway point, where you have a clear view of Petit Piton, is even better than the view from the top, where you can only see the surrounding water.

(A physically fit, middle-aged Italian couple we met on Pigeon Island made it to the top and told us they felt “shattered” afterward.)

There are many beautiful beaches on St. Lucia , but our favorite was Sugar Beach, a six-mile stretch of sparkling white sand nestled between the Pitons. Though it’s located at a luxury resort, like all beaches on the island it’s open to the public, something I wish was true in my home state of New Jersey. Unfortunately, parking is limited so we had to leave our jeep at the top of a hill and walk more than a mile down a steep, winding road to reach the beach, where the sunbeds are reserved for hotel guests.

It’s easy to get lost on St. Lucia, even with a good GPS app like Google Maps. One night we and the Italian couple ended up on a dark, dead-end road while looking for a restaurant that our Airbnb owner, a British expat named Vicky, had recommended. After driving aimlessly around the neighborhood for 15 minutes, we finally found it hidden away on top of a hill. Lucky for us, we were seated next to a table where Vicky, her family and friends were celebrating her husband’s 60th birthday with a scrumptious chocolate cake that they kindly shared with us.

The food on St. Lucia is delicious, but rather expensive. We ate a lot of fish, including the national dish of saltfish and green figs, which is what they call green bananas, the island’s No. 1 agricultural product. On our last night, we went to the Friday night Fish Fry at Anse La Raye, a small fishing village not far from our villa. It’s a traditional community gathering with food stalls set up next to the beach and reggae music blasting from huge speakers. Each stall sells fish with several side dishes such as plantains, potato cakes and cole slaw. We sampled blue marlin and two types of shrimp, coconut battered and creole style, and washed it all down with Piton, a popular local beer. (There’s a much larger fish fry/street party known as the Jump Up every Friday night at Gros Islet.)

Though English is the national language, St. Lucians speak a local brand of Creole known as Patois with friends and family. We were told the French hybrid is dying off among young people, so the government is planning to require that the language be taught in schools. As for money, the Eastern Caribbean dollar is the official currency, but U.S. dollars and credit cards are widely accepted.

As usual, we met tourists from all over the world during our trip, including visitors from Denmark, Russia, France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and India. While visiting Sulphur Springs, site of a dormant volcano, boiling mineral pools and mud baths, we met a Ukrainian couple who fled the country following the Russian invasion and now live in Paris. Amazingly, I discovered that the young woman’s grandmother came from the same town in Ukraine as my grandfather, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1897.

Until the mid-1990s, visitors could walk on the lunar-like surface at Sulphur Springs, but that was stopped after a guide fell into a hole of boiling water and suffered severe burns. Now the geothermal field can only be viewed from a nearby platform, where you can smell the pungent rotten-egg odor and see plumes of steam rising from the crater.

By the way, guides will tell you that bathing in the mineral waters will make you look 10 years younger. I think that’s a slight exaggeration, though after soaking in the hot water, I did feel a sudden affinity for rap music.

En route to the airport on our last day in St. Lucia, we visited the Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens, which incudes mineral baths built by King Louis XVI of France in 1784, and the Toraille Waterfall, where dozens of tourists posed for photos while getting deluged by the cascading water. We also stopped at upscale Hotel Chocolate, where we watched a chocolate-making class and bought a couple of expensive chocolate bars. (The cocoa industry on St. Lucia dates back to the 1700s.)

Near the airport, we checked out Anse Des Sables, the longest beach on the island. It’s on the Atlantic side of St. Lucia, which unlike the Caribbean side where we stayed has whitecap waves and blustery conditions that make it popular for windsurfing and kitesurfing.

While walking on the beach, we saw kids climbing a coconut tree and a young man kitesurfing —a last glimpse of tropical island life before heading back to our frigid home.