Couple Welcomes Baby Early 2,000 Miles from Home. Then Realizes Train Is Only Way to Get Back (Exclusive)

After flying more than 2,000 miles to attend a destination wedding in Montana, the New York couple-to-be returned home a month later with the real souvenir: a newborn daughter.

At 34 weeks pregnant, Lauren and Alex Bisset got the all-clear from their doctors to travel across the country to a close friend’s wedding, not expecting their baby girl to arrive six weeks early and nowhere near home.

Alex and Lauren Bisset

“We mentioned to my doctors at maybe 18, 20 weeks or so that we were going to have this wedding in Montana, it’s one of Alex’s best friends, and we really wanted to go,” Lauren tells PEOPLE. “Technically you’re not supposed to fly domestically after 36 weeks, so we started talking about it pretty early in the pregnancy.”

A week before flying to Montana, Lauren says she had an appointment with her doctor, who “checked everything” and noted that her pregnancy was “going perfectly well.”

On May 19, 2022, the couple who got married in 2020 flew to Montana where they enjoyed a few days before their wedding on the 21st. After a big party on Saturday night, Lauren woke up to a big surprise on Sunday morning.

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Alex and Lauren Bisset

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“On Sunday morning, I woke up to get out of bed to go pee, and my water broke,” she recalls.

“Lauren went to bed early on Saturday and I decided to stay out as best man,” says Alex. “So waking up at 6:52 with your pregnant wife and being told her water broke was quite a shock at the time. But I will tell you the adrenaline kicks in and you get over the initial shock and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God , this is happening.’ After that it was time to go.”

“It was just chaos and our heads were exploding. Alex goes from terribly hungover to scared sober within five seconds. I think the first thing he said was, ‘Are you sure you’re not peeing?’ Lauren says with a laugh.

“We should all be recovering and then flying back on Sunday, but instead we’re waking up to Lauren’s water leaking and having to climb because we’re in the middle of nowhere and thousands of miles from our home, and we don’t have a car,” says Alex, who notes that the nearest hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was more than an hour away.

“None of us thought to call 911 at the time. It was a small property and it was just the bride and groom and their family and obviously we’re not going to wake them up and we don’t really know their families well enough to wake them up,” he continues.

They ended up catching up with their friends who were in town, who immediately jumped in the car to come pick up Alex and Lauren to take them to Bozeman, Montana, to the hospital.

Alex and Lauren Bisset

During the car ride, the couple recalls hoping they would just make it to the hospital to check on her, catch a flight to New York and deliver the baby home.

“We got our OB in the car and Lauren talked to her and told her what was going on,” Alex says. “She basically said, ‘Well, you better get ready for a baby in Montana.’ And then I think it really probably hit home.”

“I pretty much burst into tears,” Lauren remembers. “This is not what was supposed to happen. We just had a meeting with our doula and put together our birth plan, and then it was just, bam, this is happening. And you don’t have a choice in the matter. I don’t have the ability to talk my way out of it and get on board take a flight and go home.”

After arriving at the hospital, Lauren had an ultrasound which showed that their baby was breech. She was told she would have a C-section two days later, which she says she was “terrified about”.

“Alex, in all his resourcefulness, took the opportunity while our friends were still with us and we had a car to make the first of about a zillion Target runs to get the things we needed because we literally only had suitcases of wedding clothes. So , he was not there at the time I was told that”.

Alex and Lauren Bisset

As they settled into their hospital room Sunday night, the couple began to feel a little calmer. “We have a plan, we’re comfortable and we’re starting to feel okay. We’re confident and everything will be okay, and that’s how we felt on Monday.”

On Monday afternoon, over the course of several hours, their baby had three separate heart-rate slowdowns that led doctors to decide it was time to take her out.

During this time, Alex was doing laundry at the house of a family friend of the bride and groom. “Since everything was going well, I thought I’d go do the laundry at that time and come back because the c-section wasn’t until tomorrow.”

“I get a call while I’m at their house doing another load of laundry, and they ask me, ‘How far are you from the hospital?’ And I say, ‘Probably 20, 30 minutes.’ And they say, ‘Well, you have to come back yesterday because we’re going to go do this C-section as soon as possible.'”

“So I’m telling this woman in her 60s to drive me as fast as possible back to the hospital, who I barely know,” Alex recalls. “And I go back to the hospital literally while our doctors clean up to go into the operating room.”

“Our birth plan just went out the window. It was so out of control,” she adds. “Next thing you know, there’s this baby coming in and they’re holding her up. And they’re telling us she’s healthy and you can hear her crying. And it’s just this very joyous moment.”

Soon after, nurses took their daughter, aptly named Everly Montana, to the NICU, where she spent 13 days gathering strength.

Alex and Lauren Bisset

“Basically we were [at the hospital] three weeks after that, two of which the baby was in intensive care. And there were no serious medical issues, but the hospital staff were just aware that we had over 2,000 miles to go home, so we wanted to make sure the baby was strong enough to handle something like that,” Alex continues.

While Everly was in intensive care, Alex and Lauren had to figure out how to get back to New York with their newborn. “At first we thought we could just fly home, no big deal. Well, any baby that’s premature has an increased risk of hypoxia, which is basically a lack of oxygen. And the way to counter that is to give the baby oxygen during the flight, but no commercial oxygen the airline wouldn’t accept that risk. So a commercial flight was pretty much out of the realm of possibility.”

“The other option was to drive. It’s 32 hours straight from where we were in Bozeman to our home in NoMad. And with a toddler you have to stop every hour until one and a half, so we were looking at a week of driving on top of the fact that, and that the hospital staff explained to us, there’s a seven-hour dead zone between Montana and through North Dakota. So driving was out of the question,” Alex says. “And then there was the whole private flying thing, which is extremely expensive.”

Alex and Lauren Bisset

“The last option, which was a late contender and actually my mom suggested first, but I thought she was joking, was the train ride,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘What the hell are you talking about? You’re taking the train? Where’s the train here?’ The morning after the hospital staff said, “Hey, we think we have an idea for you. There’s actually a train that leaves from Havre, Montana, which is about five hours north of Bozeman on the Canadian border and takes 48 hours on an Amtrak that goes from Havre to Chicago, and then from Chicago to New York.'”

“And we said, ‘Shit, this could really work, and it solves a lot of the problems we have,’ which one doesn’t take a week to come back, and two, don’t we have to worry about any risk of hypoxia,” he says Alex. “And it’s almost a much more comfortable way for the baby to travel because it’s just you on this train.”

Two weeks later, Alex and Lauren drove five and a half hours to Havre where they boarded an Amtrak train with baby Everly.

Alex and Lauren Bisset

The couple booked a sleeper car, which they share is “much better than sitting in a seat for 48 hours, but it’s extremely cramped.”

“I had to turn on my side to get in the door,” Alex recalls. “And that’s me, my wife, whose stomach has been cut open and sewn up, and our little baby in a cradle in this 30 square meter room where you can barely move. That was our home for two days.”

“The beds are bunk beds and the top one is a Murphy bed, so Lauren slept on the bottom one and I had a Murphy bed that was connected to two chains and I had to climb a ladder and my army would crawl in there to fit in” , he shares. “There wasn’t a lot of space, but the only nice part was getting into the dining car where there were little booths that you could sit in. And so we had Evy on one side of the table in her bassinet, Lauren and I would sit on the other side of the table and we would eat there. We spent a lot of time there when we weren’t sleeping.”

Alex and Lauren Bisset

“She drove the best out of all of us,” Lauren says of Everly. “The movement and being in her little cradle, she was a champion. To this day, she’s a travel expert.”

The couple had their first vacation in Chicago, where many of their friends — including the bride and groom from the Montana wedding — live.

“During our vacation, we went to one of their houses and had an early dinner. The bride and groom had already returned from their honeymoon, and we were just returning from Montana with a child in hand,” says Alex. – So much irony.

Alex and Lauren Bisset

There was also a short 45 minute stop in Albany, where Lauren is from. “We didn’t even know it was stopping in Albany for so long, but Lauren called her sister, her sister came with her mom and a few others and she met us at the tracks on the way back.”

Not long after, the couple returned to Penn Station, where Lauren’s dad was waiting to help them with their bags. Almost a month after the couple flew to Montana, they finally returned to their Manhattan apartment on June 11.

“When we walked into our apartment, it was like falling on your knees and screaming for joy,” Alex recalls. “It was a blast. It was so nice to come home and just be able to settle in and feel just a little bit calmer.”

Alex and Lauren Bisset

A month after settling back home, Alex began writing about the couple’s whirlwind journey. “Lauren said to me, ‘Hey, I don’t want to forget any of this. Can you write down everything that happened so we just don’t forget?’ I was happy to do it.”

In early December, Alex finished the first manuscript for what would eventually become his first published book, The birth of a destinationnow on sale.

“We announced it in June and we surprised so many people because we only told a small part of our immediate family that we were doing it,” says Alex. “We received so much positive feedback from our family and friends. To say the least, we were happy to have this story for us, for our families, and for Evy. And we were able to share with the Bozeman NICU that we want to donate 10% of the proceeds there the NICU fund and they loved it.”

Alex and Lauren Bisset

Rejoicing, Alex and Lauren are currently expecting their second child together in March — a baby brother for Everly. But in this case, the couple plans to stay put until their baby arrives.

“We’re trying to have a really uniform birth, as opposed to a destination birth,” laughs Lauren. “I think we’ll stay home this time.”

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Source: HIS Education