That's already hectic and stressfull without the congress part, especially if any of the preparatinon for those meetups falls to you.
Driving to my family -> i know the route very well, its not much stress;
The travel to the congress is through ICE and i always kinda looking forward to these hours in the ICE too.
And weirdly enough, not that many people are on the road at that time. Its like everyone else is traveling before, then doing nothing after silvester.
I’ve been to congress, will probably attend more too. Some people find the schedule to suck, some don’t. I do not believe it will ever change. I think it is reasonable to find the schedule hectic. My pet theory that this one soft way of keeping the congress more about the chaos communications club rather than it becoming a tech/hacker conference with a strictly international audience. And that is fine.