While I was busy battling Liza Recto about the Lower Potomac River Marathon, Phish announced its summer tour!
My gut reaction was to treat it like I usually do - request tickets to all dates that require an average of less than three hours of driving per show. Amazingly, that amounted to the first nine shows.
Thinking that might be a bit much, I created a spreadsheet detailing the price of tickets, the amount of driving (from home as well as from the previous show), hotel rates in each city, and gas usage. I then calculated the average expenditure per show for any combination of dates, thinking that maybe there would be some cost-effectiveness of flying to Chicago and checking out the three Northerly Island shows combined with the Michigan show instead of driving to Massachusetts and Upstate New York.
Obviously, the cheapest per-show rate was simply the three Randall's Island shows (coming out to around $88 per show, since no hotel would be involved). Interestingly, the next cheapest per-show combination was to do the entire first third of the tour, including a night seeing the Albany production of 'Hands on a Hardbody' (what great timing)! All told, it comes out to about $110 per show for all expenses except parking and food.
And so, after many hours of deliberation, calculation and caffeine consumption, I went with what my gut told me after all: One show at Great Woods, three at SPAC, two in Philly, and three at Randall's Island.
Today, I saw a "hold" on my credit card for $522.25. This bodes well. It means I am either going to every show but with lawn seats (awesome!), fewer shows but with pavilion seats (just as good!), or some combination thereof. And there is always Saturday's public on-sale to make up the difference.
Either way, I will see you on tour!!
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