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

Alex and Lauren Bisset take PEOPLE through their whirlwind journey of flying to Montana for a wedding and weeks later returning to New York by train with a newborn baby

After flying over 2,000 miles to attend a destination wedding in Montana, an expectant New York City couple returned home a month later with quite the souvenir: a newborn daughter.

At 34 weeks pregnant, Lauren and Alex Bisset had gotten the all-clear from their doctors to travel across the country for a close friend's wedding, not expecting that their baby girl would arrive six weeks early and nowhere close to home.

"We had mentioned to my doctors maybe around 18, 20 weeks or so that we had this wedding in Montana, it's one of Alex's best friends, and we really wanted to go," Lauren tells PEOPLE. "You're technically not supposed to fly domestically after 36 weeks, and so we really started talking about it pretty early on in the pregnancy."

The week before flying to Montana, Lauren says she had an appointment with her doctor, who "checked everything" and noted that her pregnancy was "going along perfectly fine."

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

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"On Sunday morning, I wake 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 a groomsman," Alex shares. "So waking up at 6:52 a.m. to your pregnant wife saying that her water broke was quite the shock at the time. But I will tell you that the adrenaline hits you and you come out of your initial shock and you're just like, 'Oh my God, this is happening.' It was go time after that."

"It was just mayhem and our heads were exploding. Alex is going from horribly hungover to scared sober in a matter of five seconds. I think the first thing he said was, 'Are you sure you're not just peeing?' " Lauren says with a laugh.

"We're all supposed to be recovering and then flying back on Sunday, and instead we're waking up to Lauren's water breaking and having to scramble because we're at some venue 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 closest hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was over an hour away.

"It didn't really occur to any of us to call 911 at the time. It was this small property and it was just the bride and groom and their family and we're obviously not going to wake them and we don't really know their families that well to wake them up," he continues.

Eventually, they got a hold of their friends who were staying a town over, who immediately hopped in the car to come pick up Alex and Lauren to drive them to Bozeman, Montana, to get to the hospital.

During the car ride, the couple recalls feeling hopeful they could just get to the hospital to check on things, get on a flight back to New York and have the baby back home.

"We got a hold of our OB-GYN in the car, and Lauren talked to her and told her what was going on," says Alex. "She basically was like, 'Well, you better get ready to have your 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 the meeting with our doula and put together our birth plan and then it just was, bam, this is happening. And you don't have a choice in the matter. You don't have the option of talking your way out of it and getting on a flight and going home."

After arriving at the hospital, Lauren had an ultrasound which showed that their baby was breech. She was told she would have a cesarean section two days later, which she says she was "terrified of having."

"Alex, in all of his resourcefulness, seized 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 stuff that we needed because we literally just had suitcases of wedding clothes. So he wasn't there at the time when this was being told to me."

As they settled into their hospital room on Sunday night, the couple began to feel a little more calm. "We have a plan, we're comfortable and we're starting to feel okay. We're safe and everything's going to be okay, and we felt that way into Monday."

On Monday afternoon, over the course of a few hours, their baby had three separate heart rate decelerations leading doctors to decide it was time to get her out.

During that time, Alex was off doing laundry at the house of a family friend of the bride and groom's. "Since everything had been going okay, I thought I would go do laundry at that time and come back since the c-section wasn't happening until tomorrow."

"I get the call while I'm at their house doing the second load of laundry, and they ask, 'How far are you from the hospital?' And I'm like, 'Probably 20, 30 minutes.' And they say, 'Well, you need to get back here yesterday because we're going to go and 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 get back to the hospital literally as our doctors are scrubbing up to go to the operating room."

"Our birth plan just went out the window. It was just so out of control," he adds. "Next thing you know, here's this baby coming and they're holding her up. And they're telling us she's healthy and you can hear her cry. And it's just this very joyous moment."

Shortly after, nurses took their daughter, whom they aptly named Everly Montana, to the NICU, where she spent 13 days getting up her strength.

"We were basically [at the hospital] for three weeks after that, two of which the baby was in the NICU. And there were no serious medical problems, but the hospital staff was just very aware that we had over a 2,000-mile journey home, so we want to make sure that the baby is strong enough to be able to handle something like that," Alex continues.

During Everly's time in the NICU, Alex and Lauren had to figure out how to get back to New York with their newborn. "First we thought we could just fly home, no big deal. Well, any baby that's preterm has an increased risk of hypoxia, which is basically suffering from oxygen deprivation. And the way to counteract that is to give a baby oxygen on a flight, but no commercial airline is going to accept that risk. So a commercial flight was pretty much out of the realm of possibilities."

"The second option was driving. It's a 32-hour straight shot from where we were in Bozeman to our home in NoMad. And with an infant child, you need to stop every one to one and a half hours, so we were looking at a week drive on top of the fact that, and this was explained to us by the hospital staff, there's a dead zone between Montana and through North Dakota that's for seven hours. So driving was out of the question," says Alex. "And then there was the whole flying privately, which is extremely expensive."

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

"And we were like, 'Holy crap, this might actually work, and it solves a lot of the issues that we're having,' which one, is not taking a week to get back, and two, is you don't have to worry about any risk of hypoxia," Alex says. "And it's almost a much more comfortable way for the baby to travel because you're just on this train."

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

The couple booked a sleeper car, which they share is "much better than sitting in a seat for 48 hours, but it's extremely tight."

"I had to turn sideways to get into the door," Alex recalls. "And it's me, my wife, whose belly has been cut open and stitched closed, and our infant child in a bassinet in this 30-square-foot room where you can barely move around. So that was our home for two days."

"The beds are bunk beds and the top one is a Murphy bed, and so Lauren slept on the bottom one, and I had this Murphy bed that connected to two chains and I would have to climb up a ladder and army crawl my way in there to fit," he shares. "There wasn't a lot of floor space, but the only nice part was going into the dining cabin car where there were little booths you could sit in. And so we'd 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'd eat in there. That's where we spent a lot of time when we weren't sleeping."

"She had the best ride of all of us," Lauren says of Everly. "The motion and being in her little bassinet, she was a champ. To this day she's an expert traveler."

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

"During our layover, we ended up going to one of their houses and having an early dinner. The bride and groom were already back from their honeymoon, and we were just making our way back from Montana with the child in tow," Alex says. "So much irony."

There was also a short stop in Albany for 45 minutes, where Lauren is from. "We didn't even know it was stopping for that long in Albany, but Lauren called her sister, her sister came with her mom and some others and met us on the tracks for a little bit on the way back."

Not long after, the couple arrived back at Penn Station, where Lauren's dad was waiting to help them with their bags. Nearly one month after the pair flew out to Montana, they finally returned to their Manhattan apartment on June 11.

"When we stepped into our apartment, it was like you wanted to drop to your knees and shout for joy," Alex recalls. "It was elation. It was so nice to be back home and just be able to get settled and just feel a little more at peace."

One month after settling back in at home, Alex began to write about the couple's whirlwind journey. "Lauren said to me, 'Hey, I don't want to forget any of this. Would you mind taking notes on everything that happened so that 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 Destination Birth, on sale now.

"We published it in June and we surprised so many people because we'd only told even a small part of our close family that we were doing this," says Alex. "We got so much positive feedback from our family and friends. At the very least, we were just 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 wanted to donate 10% of the proceeds to the NICU fund there, and they loved it."

Looking forward, Alex and Lauren are currently expecting their second baby together in March — a little brother for Everly. But this go-around, the couple plans to stay put until their baby arrives.

"We're trying to have a really uneventful, opposite of a destination birth," Lauren laughs. "I think we'll stay local this time."

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