I'm Wes. By day I run Stealth Digital, a digital marketing agency in North Bay, Ontario. In March 2026, my wife and I took our two teenagers (13 and 15) to St. Lucia for two weeks, rented a car, and drove the island ourselves. This site is everything we learned.
I'm not a travel writer, and this isn't a travel business. We came home with a phone full of photos, a notebook full of my wife's daily spending records, and more opinions about St. Lucian roadside BBQ than any family reasonably needs. I build websites for a living, so putting it all somewhere other people could use it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
Credit where it's due
My name is on the byline, but the truth is this was a group effort. My wife planned the entire trip (the Airbnb, the routes, the activities) and recorded what we spent every single day. Every real price you see on this site exists because of her. The photos and videos were taken by our daughter and me, usually while she was busy doing something more useful.
How we travel
We've travelled a lot: extensively across Canada and a fair bit internationally. At home, our idea of a vacation is a multi-day canoe trip in the Ontario backcountry or a long hiking trail. The West Coast Trail is my favourite place on earth, or at least it was until March.
That style carries over wherever we go. We travel independently, on a modest budget, and we'd rather figure out where the locals eat than be handed a buffet plate. A two-week road trip around a Caribbean island turns out to be the same instinct as a canoe trip: plan your route, pack carefully, carry cash, and talk to people.
Our kind of trip
- →Independent travel, our own wheels
- →Local food, local culture, local prices
- →Long trails & multi-day canoe trips
- →A modest budget, spent deliberately
Not our kind of trip
- ✕Bus tours on somebody else's schedule
- ✕Crowded all-inclusive resorts
- ✕Seeing an island through a window
Why this site exists
The trip itself started with an offer we couldn't refuse: a friend offered to host us at his villa on the island. That was all the excuse we needed.
But when my wife was planning the rest of it, almost everything we could find about St. Lucia was written for resort guests: which all-inclusive to pick, which catamaran tour to book. Almost nothing answered the questions we actually had: can a regular family drive these roads, what does a rental really cost, where do you eat between Soufrière and the north when everything looks closed?
We figured those answers out the slow way, on the island. Between my wife's daily records and a few thousand photos, it felt like too much useful information to leave sitting in a notebook.
If we recommend a roadside BBQ shack on this site, it's because we ate there. Usually twice.
Where we stayed
Full disclosure, since this site is built on real numbers: we stayed at our friend's villa at Cap Cove on Plantation Beach, as guests of the owner. That's the one cost on this trip my wife couldn't record, so you won't find accommodation in our budget breakdowns. And you should treat anything we say about where to stay accordingly.
What I can tell you is that basing ourselves at the island's quiet northern end, just past Rodney Bay, shaped the whole trip. The good: a full kitchen (which is how the oatmeal breakfasts and packed lunches happened), grocery stores and the marina a short drive away, a pool the kids never left, and 24-hour security. Staying outside the resorts is also how we kept stumbling into the local food that fills these pages.
The trade-off: the north is a long way from Soufrière and the Pitons. Every big day in the south meant a real mountain drive there and back, and finding dinner on the return leg was a recurring adventure.
The full tour (the villa, Robert and his cutlass, the wingfoil lessons, and the honest downsides) has its own page: where we stayed.
Nobody paid us to write any of this. No agency, restaurant, or tour operator on this site knows we exist. Our accommodation was a stay at a friend's Airbnb, as his guests, which is why we quote prices for everything except where we slept. Every other price is what we actually paid in March 2026.
Say hello
If you've driven the island and found something we missed, if a price has changed, or if you just want to tell us about a BBQ stand we need to try next time. We'd genuinely love to hear it. There's a contact link in the footer below.