The best way to travel: sleeper trains

Monday night we left Bangkok to head to Chiang Mai, which is a mountain city in North Thailand. We were waiting in Bangkok on our 4th traveler, but because of traffic his bus took two and a half hours instead of one. His phone had died so we had no way of contacting him. We had to leave him a note and hope he figured it out because we had to leave for the train station. Fitting ourselves and all of our suitcases into a taxi was crazy but we managed. We were on the road by 610 and had to be to the station by 630. What we didn't consider was weekday rush hour traffic in Bangkok. Wooops! We were at a standstill on the highway. We didn't make it to the station until 705 and our train was supposed to leave at 730. We had to go to a separate station to pick up our tickets first and then make it to our train. We made it by the skin of our teeth and boarded at 728. Woo. What a close call. We found our bunks, which were quite nice actually, had some dinner and then slept. In the morning we woke up to breakfast and then had one hour left before arrival. It was fantastic!