Overnight bus trip- big mistake

   This weekend we decided to take one of the overnight buses from Kaohsiung instead of the high speed trains. The HSR is amazing. It almost makes Kaohsiung which is on the southern end of Taiwan feel like a suburb of Taipei on the north end. You can get on in Kaohsiung and get off about 100 minutes later in Taipei. However, it costs about $100 round trip and it doesn't run from about 11pm until about 6am. So if you are trying to make a 6AM hockey practice in Taipei on Saturday morning it means you have to take the train up Friday evening, stay overnight in a hotel for about 6 hours, get up at around 5AM and take a cab to the rink. There are also overnight buses that run 24 hours a day to Taipei. We were told that they take about 5 hours and you sleep on the bus. So we thought this weekend we would come home from school, eat dinner, and rest a bit. Then head out for a bus that leaves just before midnight with plans to sleep all the way to Taipei and get in around 5AM and go straight to the rink. Bus fare is about half the train fare plus no hotel needed so it would be much less expensive and maybe even better...
    The buses themselves are pretty nice. Huge seat like in a first class cabin on a domestic flight. They even reclined a good bit although not flat. Unfortunately the drive time is quite a bit less in the middle of the night with no traffic and the driver just wants to get there as fast as he can so he can empty his bus and go home and go to bed. So, the drivers haul ass on what my guess is a mix of Sudafed, betel nut, and caffeine.  We arrived in Taipei around 3:30 AM. and were promptly kicked off the bus into a mostly empty bus station. No time to go to a hotel. Too early to go to the rink. Everyone exhausted.  We ended up all collapsed on benches in the terminal with our bags piled up around us. The kids tried to lie down with their heads in our laps and were told by a security guard that they couldn't lie down. So everyone just leaned against each other on the benches until we could go to the rink. This picture probably shows best how miserable it was. Won't be doing that again.

Just before security busted kids for lying down. Person in corner shows correct way to sleep in bus stations and would not be out of place even at the Port Authority terminal in New York