3/28/2012 Springsteen Tour 2012

My daughters gave me a great birthday present: a ticket to Bruce Springsteen at the TD Garden in Boston two nights ago. I've been a fan for a long time (saw him with Jackson Browne at the Villanova Field House in October 1973), and this show was just GREAT!

The next day I hit Tour infomation on backstreets.com click for link and wanted to make maps of his USA and Europe tour legs. Starting with Excel, I made two spreadsheets - one for the USA

and one for Europe

I want to use Tableau for visualization; it has a nice little geocoding database (ZIP Codes, City Names, etc), so I only had to find latiutude-longitude for a few cities. Europe, on the other hand, needed latitude-longitude populated directly into the spreadsheet, so I consulted a misc. site on the Internet.

After bringing the files into Tableau, I ran the data in a time-series, which shows Bruce jumping all over the country (as the little red dotted lines indicate)(March 9 - May 2)

But that is nothing compared to the chicken scratches that makes up his European tour (May 13 - July 31):

Thanks, Bruce, for all the memories, and for keeping it alive.