A nor’easter swept away their wedding plans, so the Hatteras Island community pulled together a celebration. Now, the couple is giving back
Kim Laprad and Jayden Sink smile at their wedding on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, at Frisco Woods Campground, with officiant Stacey Saunders behind them. (Photo courtesy Gwenyth Airhart — GwenyGrace Photography)
By Corinne Saunders
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FRISCO — A Roanoke, Virginia, couple whose original wedding plans were swept away with last week’s nor’easter, and for whom the Hatteras Island community rallied to throw a wedding, is now fundraising for the island’s Frisco-Buxton Pathway Project.
Jayden Sink and Kimberly “Kim” Laprad arrived on Hatteras Island around 4 a.m. last Thursday, just before the island’s only roadway access closed due to damage from the nor’easter-driven overwash.
The couple had planned to marry on Friday, but their guests were on the other side of the now-closed section of N.C. Highway 12, and their backyard venue was overtaken by the ocean, Sink said.
“Thursday night, we went to sleep, and we didn’t have anywhere to have a wedding,” Sink said. “We woke up Friday morning and there was an entire wedding planned for us on Saturday.”
Locals rallied and people gifted a venue, officiant, DJ, photographers, food, flowers and more—with celebration attendance over 400.
Laprad thanked everyone involved in a public Facebook post.
“You didn’t have to come,” she wrote. “You didn’t have to donate. You didn’t have to volunteer. You didn’t have to care about whether two people you’d never met got to have their wedding. But you did.”
She noted, “We started this weekend thinking we were going to get married surrounded by our family and closest friends. Instead, we got married surrounded by an entire community.”
In their GoFundMe campaign, the couple wrote: “We can’t repay that. But we can help with something the island has been asking for since 2019.”
Frisco and Buxton are the last Hatteras Island villages with no sidewalk, they wrote, noting that locals and visitors walk and bike the N.C. Highway 12 shoulder “in traffic that surges every summer.”
Sink, who spoke to Outer Banks Insider by phone as the couple was driving home on Wednesday, said the fundraising page has already been widely shared online, with over $3,000 raised in the first three days. He plans to continue sharing the donation opportunity.
“What I’m gonna do is reach out to a lot of business owners when I get home and really kind of campaign behind this and see if anybody wants to, you know, leverage some good tax deductions there,” he said.
“Not the actual storm, but the chain of events that happened was the perfect storm to line up for us to be able to help the community,” Sink added, noting that they are “so happy that we can get that out there.”
He said they learned of the multiuse pathway need from conversations with Stacey Saunders, manager of Frisco Woods Campground and chair of the nonprofit Frisco-Buxton Pathway Project. Saunders was instrumental in organizing the couple’s wedding, having offered the couple the campground as a venue and her services as an officiant.
“After they kind of had told me what was going on and, you know, what the pain point was, I really started to think about it,” Sink said, noting that he hadn’t given sidewalks much thought before, as they already exist “back home” and in cities nationwide.
He opined that the community of “incredibly kind” people deserves a safe way to walk their dogs, ride their bikes or hike the island.
“I think it could potentially be something that could drive more tourism to the community, because who doesn’t want to hike from one end of the island to another?” Sink said. “I mean, people hike Europe… If you put a greenway basically on the island, you know, people are gonna love it.”
All the money donated through the GoFundMe will go to the nonprofit and be used as matching funds for project grants currently being pursued, he said.
“It will not be used for anything other than construction or maintaining of the pathway,” Saunders said.
Frisco Woods Campground in 2023 donated 1,424 feet of sidewalk near the business, “which is a mere drop in the bucket to 7.63 miles of sidewalk that’s truly needed,” she noted.
Dream come true
Laprad said that she’d long dreamed of getting married on the Outer Banks.
“Growing up with my family, it was one of our favorite vacation spots,” Laprad said. “Of all the places that we’ve been, that’s been my favorite, so it was always my dream to get married out there on the Outer Banks.”
Saunders said she saw the couple’s online post that they were in Waves, about a half hour away, and that their wedding plans had fallen apart with the storm.
“I reached out; I said, ‘If you guys can get to me, I’ve got a location for you,’” Saunders said.
After learning their officiant was on the other side of the broken road, Saunders told the couple she is an ordained minister and would be honored to do their service.
“That’s how it all started,” Saunders said. “And then almost immediately after I posted on Facebook that, you know, I had a location and I was a minister, our DJ Kevin Lawrence, he chimed right in that, ‘Hey, if you’re going to be at Frisco Woods, I can do your music.’ And then it just grew from there.”
She said she learned that 458 people signed the guest book, but saw multiple social media comments saying many others did not.
“I really believe that there was 600 plus [people] because it was a come-and-go event,” Saunders said. “The same people that started the day off with the ceremony, not all of them stayed to close it down.”
The couple asked for no gifts, but Saunders said the gift table was “overflowing.” She requested that people bring their own beverages and a dish to share, and there was abundant food, including two cakes and cupcakes.
“I believed that our community would come together,” Saunders said. “I believed that we could pull this off with the 24 hours.”
Both Saunders and Sink opined that the event would have been hard to top, whatever the timeframe.
“I think the wedding that we had was better than the wedding we had planned,” Sink said.
“Everything fell into place,” Saunders said. “I do not think that we could have done better if we would have had weeks to plan it.”
She added, “So the fact that now they’ve turned this around and are wanting to give back to the pathway—I’m speechless and blessed and thankful that I was able to witness my community that I live in come together for strangers.”
Kim Laprad and Jayden Sink walk among bubbles at their wedding on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, at Frisco Woods Campground. (Photo courtesy Gwenyth Airhart — GwenyGrace Photography)
‘A marvelous experience’
Saunders said this was the first time she’d ever made plans at her work site without first consulting with the owner. But, like the rest of the island, he immediately jumped onboard.
“My first reaction was, ‘Sounds like a good idea,’” said Ward “Buster” Barnett. “She didn’t ask me, but I liked what I heard when she told me.”
He said that business was limited with the road closure, and he was happy to help since they could. He and others involved experienced a series of surprises, from the size of the wedding, to it turning into a national story, to the couple fundraising for the pathway project.
“We didn’t really expect anything from it, to be honest with you, other than just doing something good; that’s all,” Barnett said.
He attended the wedding, and his staff “helped kind of oversee the place.”
But helping the couple in turn benefited everyone.
“Makes you feel good,” he noted. “I think the island kind of needed something at the time, and maybe I’m no different than any of the other islanders. Maybe we needed something, too.”
Barnett, a Frisco resident originally from the area who has seen many storms, said he expected the road to be closed for two weeks. He tipped his hat to those making that quick work.
“We’ve got our road open now, and everybody’s happy—and we had a marvelous experience in the meantime,” Barnett said.
Sink said he had never been to the Outer Banks before this trip, but he is now connected.
“I think the wedding that we had was better than the wedding we had planned.”
— Jayden Sink, groom
“I’m ADHD, so I, like, I pay attention to everything,” Sink said. “And there were so many people moving [at the wedding], so I will admit I was a little overwhelmed.”
The couple decided to put aside any feelings of discomfort and make the hundreds of strangers-turned-guests feel welcome—so they conversed, shook hands and took pictures with guests for about three hours, he said.
“We basically did like a speed-date-the-community,” Sink quipped. “So that was pretty awesome.”
Inviting the island began as a joke to lift their spirits after realizing their guests could not make it, but it has now become an epic tale.
“We were all kind of just defeated and disappointed and down, and Kim said as a joke…‘Let’s just invite the whole island; why not?’” Sink recalled. “It was supposed to be something that was funny, but it very quickly turned into something that was serious.”
Outlets including People magazine, CBS, The Washington Post and Good Morning America have each picked up their wedding story, which the Hatteras Island-based Island Free Press first covered.
“I think we’re going to try to sell the rights to our wedding story to Hallmark,” Sink said.
The GoFundMe to benefit the Frisco-Buxton Pathway Project is linked here.
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