Routing a tour is a logistics puzzle wearing a romantic disguise. Here is what actually decided the dates.

Drive time is the real constraint

The instinct is to route by city size — play the big rooms, fill the gaps with whatever is nearby. That produces a schedule where you arrive at load-in having driven six hours, and by the fourth of those in a row the show is worse than the room deserved. So the first pass was not about cities at all. It was a map with a four-hour radius drawn around each confirmed date, and anything outside it got cut regardless of how good the venue was.

• Four hours between shows, hard limit, with one exception for the crossing to Copenhagen
• A full day off after every fifth show, non-negotiable after what happened last spring
• No two Mondays in a row in a city that does not go out on Mondays

The venues that said yes first

Three rooms confirmed before anything else was settled, and those three anchored the whole route. Everything since has been drawn around them. It is not the tour we sketched in December — the southern leg fell out entirely when a promoter changed hands — but it is a tour the five of us can actually play well twenty-two times, which is the only version worth booking.

Tickets for the added second night are on the tour page. The first night sold out faster than anyone expected and we would rather add a date than move to a bigger room.