Our Spontaneous New Zealand Wedding Elopement Story

After two days of enjoying our secret wedding, we called our parents and told them we’d eloped.

We are officially Mr and Mrs.

Thankfully, everyone was absolutely over the moon.

I’d spent the whole day super anxious about how everyone would react, but it was beyond amazing.

We got married on the 12th of October in the Port Hills in New Zealand in front of three people: our wonderful celebrant, his wife, who became our witness, and a wonderful photographer who doubled up as witness number two.

Our relationship before the wedding elopement

In case you don’t know me and Stew, here’s a bit of context. After a month of dating, Stew turned to me and told me he had something to tell me.”Great.” I thought. These aren’t the words you want to hear in your new relationship.

“I’m going to quit my job and cycle around the world,” Stew said, “do you want to come?”
I said, “Yes” in an instant.

And just like that, our circumnavigation of the world by bike began.

We cycled from the UK to Vietnam over the course of a year and celebrated our one-year dating anniversary in Paris. We were in Vietnam in March 2020 when we sadly had to fly home. In March 2023, we flew back to Vietnam, back to the same apartment we left and continued our adventure around the globe.

By October 2023, we’d cycled to New Zealand, and while there, we decided to get married!

The Full New Zeland Elopement Story

The seed was planted on our final cycling day in Australia. We’d cycled (actually, I pushed my bike) to the top of Bulli Pass in Aus, a hell of a climb!

At the top was a gorgeous wedding venue with a stunning view.

We talked about weddings: the price, the way we might do it, a small reception followed by a meal, or something else that didn’t inspire us, but it was what we knew.

Later that day, I Googled ‘get married in New Zealand’ and found loads of content on elopements in New Zealand. They looked BEAUTIFUL (and inexpensive compared to a traditional wedding!)

I mentioned it to Stew…

We left Aus days later, flew to NZ, and got talking about it again on our first night in Queenstown.

The next morning, we emailed a few celebrants to see what an NZ wedding really entails.

You know, just out of interest…

A man emailed back within hours. We got on a Zoom call with him the next morning.

He was a lovely Irish gentleman with a great sense of humour and a calming presence.

He assured us a marriage in NZ is very easy to organise, and he would love to be our celebrant.

His name was Sean Joyce, and we warmed to him instantly.

Sean said he could help us organise the lot, he told us where we could buy rings, the dress and suit hire, flowers, etc., and even said, for two good bottles of wine, he’d find us two witnesses.

His wife, Veronica, became our witness and did a reading at the wedding. I asked for the love chapter from Corinthians 4-8, which is beautiful.

Our second witness, Chris, doubled up as the photographer. As you can see from the images, he was fantastic.

There and then, on our first call with Sean, we set a date just three weeks away.

I closed the laptop, and we went into town. Full of nervous excitement, we bought two rings from a local shop made with New Zealand gold and hired wedding attire that was posted to Sean’s home on the outskirts of Christchurch.

All of this within two days of landing in NZ. And we weren’t officially engaged.

Stew said he wanted me to have a proper proposal, so he picked up a placeholder ring.

He proposed to me in Queenstown on a Gondola.

With plans underway, I wasn’t expecting a proposal, and definitely not there as a gondola isn’t Stew’s most relaxed place.

He did say he had to get down on one knee pretty fast before the compounding nerves from the swinging gondola consumed him.

My actual engagement ring, given to us by his grandad, is back in the UK, tucked away in a safe place, waiting for us to get to Europe. Stew planned to have the ring bought out to Portugal by his mum, and he was going to propose in Paris.

Everything was very spontaneous.

Giddy with our new top-secret engagement, we started the ~500-mile ride to Christchurch, where we would be married.

Just 40 miles in, there was a landslide in the road ahead, leaving us stuck in Wanaka.

The road closures meant we couldn’t make our own wedding date, so we had to delay it by another week as we waited it out.
Luckily, everyone, including hairdressers and florists, were flexible.

The ‘venue’, recommended by Sean, was The Sign of the Bellbird, Port Hill, Christchurch, and we were married in front of three people with the birdsong to soothe our nerves.

We tried to avoid writing vows and asked for traditional vows that we’d repeat after Sean, but Sean was having none of it.

He knew this wasn’t right for us.

Sean had us write down things we value in each other and send them to him via email. A less intimidating task than writing vows.

We did this thinking Sean would put them into his script, but instead, he had us read them out to each other on the hill!

The day before, in his warm Irish accent, Sean said to us, “Your emails are beautiful. You can read these to each other.”

Stew and I exchanged nervous glances, “we don’t want to do that.”

“It’s a great idea,” Sean assured us sweetly but assertively, “and it’s what you’re going to do.”

Well, ok then…who are we to argue?

The New Zealand elopement ceremony

During the ceremony, Sean stepped back to give us this very intimate moment. We were going to say what we loved about each other.

I got through half of ‘vow’ one, and the tears started (mine), which is exactly why I wanted to avoid vows.

But it was so, so worth it.

It added a lovely layer to the day, and I’m so grateful Sean knew exactly what to encourage and how to push us out of our comfort zone.

Sean, who had married his 700th couple just a week before, came to my rescue. He carried a handkerchief in preparation.

Through tears, I asked him if he always carried a handkerchief. He did. He also pulled out a little plastic dinosaur. He keeps it in his celebrant suit pocket because four-year-old boys often need a distraction at weddings.

He really was brilliant.

He knew exactly when to let a moment breathe and when to break the lovely but intense moments with a perfectly timed joke or light comment.

The weather was absolutely perfect.

Perfect, perfect blue skies all day.

Under Chris’s direction, we posed for photographs. He directed formal pictures mixed with playful poses and even had us dancing outside. Even I felt very comfortable in front of the camera with Chris behind it.

That night, we went to a hotel; the only people were dressed in wedding attire.

We drank cocktails, had a fancy meal, and a toast to our new marriage.

The staff took amazing care of us with free cocktails, a cake and claps from the excited waitresses.

For days, we relished our secret without uttering a word.

Then we told our parents, grandparents and brothers; six calls in four hours, so everyone found out around the same time.

Thank goodness they were as happy as we were, and now I can finally tell you.

So, here we are, Mr. Stewart Law and Mrs. Zoe Ashbridge-Law.

I can’t quite let go of my surname, I love it. I’ll change my name legally when we return to the UK so we can enjoy our honeymoon (I guess) – passport-drama free – through 6 countries, cycling home from New Zealand.

To be honest, at times, I worried that an elopement wedding with just a couple of witnesses might not feel complete or meaningful, but for us, it was the perfect way to do it. It was deeply meaningful and more special than I could’ve even dreamed.

As I write this blog, we’re in Sean’s home. He lives near Port Hill, and his spare rooms are listed on Airbnb.

We stayed with Sean and Vee for days.

It’s been so unique and special. What started off as a (mostly) innocent email has brought layers and layers of pure joy.

Post written by: Zoe Ashbridge