This second leg is just one WTF after another. A whole lot of ill-advised decisions. Corpus makes no sense. It's close enough to SA to cover that base, and too far from Houston to get any of those folks. It'll actually lessen sales of the SA gig, or it would if the handful of fans hadn't already blown their money on SA tickets. They won't get more than a handful doing both gigs. Better still, the dates for the locales are batshit crazy. The KC to Tuscon leg of this tour clocks in at 2814 miles, and it doesn't include Houston. By putting the dates in order they could have knocked that down to 1802, and that was actually factoring in a stop in Houston. How does KC to Corpus and then back to Tulsa and down to Dallas make any sense?
The northeast segment makes me scratch my head, as well. PA to NH, VT, NY, MA, NJ then on to . . . Maine . . . before heading back down to NY. It's odd.
As ProgSnob said, it probably has to do with venue availability. Even if you look at the tourdates for previous tours, you would see some odd routing of the tours where the band is zigzagging back and forth. And that's not just DT. I remember catching Rush on the Vapor Trails tour. I saw them in LA, then San Diego, then Phoenix, then....Irvine (which is between LA and San Diego). In any case, management wouldn't agree to this routing if it was going to be too costly. Certainly in the NE it's not that big of a deal to zigzag, given the close proximity to many of the cities.
As for why they booked Corpus Christi instead of Houston - good question. But maybe it was because there weren't any promoters/venues in Houston willing to book the show within the window of time given. And at least the show is in Corpus Christi as opposed to Austin, which is closer to SA and not that far away from D/FW.
Is this shaping up to be one of their more extensive USA tours?
It's odd they aren't doing something like this with a more career spanning setlists for the cities that haven't seen DT in a long time.
Definitely the most extensive run they've done through North America in quite a few years - probably at least the M2000 if not before. They always seemed to stick with the maximum of 5 weeks on the road at one time. Perhaps now that most of their kids are high school/college age, they're finally lifting that restriction.
Might be the most bizarrely communicated tour I've ever seen. Perhaps they tried to give the fans a reason to check back everyday, kind of a new announcement daily. But like others have mentioned, the staggering of on sales amongst close cities is strange.
I don't know if I'd say that Tim. I mean, it does seem a bit strange in comparison to how DT's announced tourdates for years, but back in the day, the trickling in of tourdates was a normal thing, and this resembles that. Why are they going this route as opposed to having everything lined up ahead of time and just announcing them all at once is a mystery, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is as you suggested - giving fans a reason to check back on a regular basis.