Alex & Jey · a road-trip wedding

We couldn’t fly everyone to Thailand. So we drove Thailand to everyone.

Alex from Portland, Oregon, Jey from Chiang Mai — married barefoot on a beach at the bottom of the country, 1,540 km from where we started. You couldn’t be there. Come along anyway.

Follow the drive Read the vows

Alex and Jey standing together against their dusty tea-coloured car, sunburnt and smiling, early on the drive

Four grey-green handmade stoneware cups on a wooden market table, one visibly cracked

Chiang Mai, 2019

It started with four cups

Jey sold cups at the Sunday Walking Street market — grey-green stoneware she threw herself, two streets from the studio she still works in. Alex, three weeks into a backpacking trip he kept extending, bought one on the first Sunday.

He came back the next Sunday and bought a second, to have a matching pair. The Sunday after that, a third. On the fourth Sunday Jey asked why a man travelling with one small bag needed four cups, and Alex admitted he did not need any of them.

He changed his flight six weeks later. He still has all four cups. One of them is cracked, and Jey says that is the one that counts.

Portland ↔ Chiang Mai, 2019–2023

Fifteen hours and a dateline

Then came the years nobody photographs well: 6am-for-one and 9pm-for-the-other calls, four long visits, and one bad stretch where they almost didn’t. Jey came to Oregon once, was cold for three weeks, and loved his mother.

Alex moved to Chiang Mai for good in 2023 — above a laundry, two streets from the studio. The distance was the hard part. It is also the reason the rest of this made sense.

Jey bundled in a borrowed coat on a grey Oregon day, unmistakably not at home in the cold

Why there was no invitation

Nobody was invited, because we couldn’t invite anyone

Their people don’t travel. Alex’s father doesn’t fly well; his friends are scattered across three time zones. Jey’s grandmother — the one who raised her — has never been on a plane and, at 83, is not going to start.

Asking everyone to fly fifteen hours for one afternoon felt like the wrong thing to ask. So they turned it around. They would drive the length of their own country, marry on a beach at the bottom of it, just the two of them and one friend to hold the camera — and put the whole thing here, so the people who could not come could still come along.

The morning they left, Jey’s grandmother tied white cotton string around both their wrists and told Alex, in Northern Thai he did not understand, to drive slowly and feed her granddaughter properly. The string stayed on both their wrists the whole way down. You can see it in the photographs from the beach, twelve days later.

Jey’s grandmother tying white sai sin string around Alex’s and Jey’s wrists in the studio doorway

Alex loading the packed tea-coloured Honda outside the pottery studio at dawn in Chiang Mai, Jey at the open passenger door

What this is

A keepsake for the people who couldn’t come

There’s no RSVP here, no registry, no seating plan — nobody could travel, so there was nothing to arrange. What there is: the whole drive, stop by stop, and the two letters we wrote on a lake and read on the beach. Take your time with them.

See the six stops Read the vows

Alex & Jey is a demonstration website. The couple, their families, the dates, the stories at each stop and the photographs on this site are invented. No real wedding took place, no real person is depicted, and nothing typed into the guestbook is sent or saved.

Leave them a note

You couldn’t be on the beach. Say something anyway.

You couldn’t be on the beach. You can still say something. Add a blessing below and watch it join the wall.

Your father cried at the photo of the car. He’ll deny it.

— Margaret, Portland
ขับช้าๆ นะลูก. Drive slowly. I am watching from here.

— ย่า (Grandma), Chiang Mai
I was there. The dog says congratulations too.

— Meaw, on the beach
Four cups. Mate. FOUR.

— Danny, Melbourne