Five Things Worth Doing This Weekend in Gwinnett and Clayton

The weekend list works through the five metro counties two at a time. Fulton and DeKalb, then Cobb and Gwinnett, then Clayton and Fulton, then DeKalb and Cobb, so this week it is Gwinnett and Clayton, Friday October 16 through Sunday October 18. Gwinnett has the heavier weekend by some distance; Clayton has two things worth the drive. Every date, time, address and price below came off the organizer's or the venue's own page this week. Check that page again before you leave the house, and here is why: a veterans health and resource fair scheduled for this same Saturday at the Lake Spivey Recreation Center in Jonesboro is now marked canceled on Clayton County's own calendar, while a newspaper community listing still carries it. That is the normal failure mode for a weekend list, and it is why the link matters more than the list.

Friday through Sunday, Gwinnett: the Sugar Rush Arts Festival in downtown Sugar Hill. The festival runs Saturday October 17 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday October 18 from noon to 6 p.m., centered on West Broad Street, and the organizer says admission and parking are both free. The vendor list runs about 116 deep, broken out as 45 art, 27 crafts, 21 food and 23 businesses and local organizations, and around it sit the Sugar Hill Arts Commission's juried art show, a kids zone with On The Stage Children's Theatre and All Stars Performing Arts Academy, gem mining run by the Sugar Hill Historic Preservation Society, a petting zoo, inflatables and food trucks. A free kick-off concert opens the weekend Friday at The Bowl, doors at 7 p.m. and sets at 8 and 9. Sort one wrinkle out before Friday: the city's own page calls that concert free and says nothing about tickets, while Gwinnett's family events listing says it needs a free reservation. Reserve one anyway. Two addresses float around for the same block, 5029 and 5039 West Broad Street, and either puts you in the right place.

This is the one I would take kids to. Downtown Sugar Hill is a genuinely compact core built around The Bowl amphitheater and a parking deck, so you are not walking in from a hayfield the way you are at most fall festivals. Compact cuts both ways, though: three events inside one small footprint across three days means the deck fills on Saturday afternoon and stays full. Sunday is shorter and quieter, and it is the day you can actually talk to the people who made what you are looking at.

Friday, Clayton: Stately Oaks in Jonesboro, open to the public exactly one day a week. Historical Jonesboro runs the site at 100 Carriage Lane and opens it Fridays from noon to 4 p.m., tours leaving on the hour with the last at 3. The house tour is $14 for adults 18 to 54, $11 for seniors 55 and up, military and students 12 to 17, $6 for children 6 to 11, free for children 5 and under. Grounds only, self-guided, is $6. The 1839 main house is an antebellum Greek Revival listed on the National Register, and the rest of the site is the part people do not expect: an 1839 outdoor log kitchen, a tenant house, a blacksmith building, a well house, Juddy's Country Store, and Old Bethel School, which the organization calls the last one-room schoolhouse in Clayton County. Noon to four on a Friday is the only public window in a normal week. If this has been on your list for a year, this is the week.

Friday, Gwinnett: MercyMe at Gas South Arena, 6400 Sugarloaf Parkway in Duluth, with Jeremy Camp, Tim Timmons and Sam Wesley. The district's own calendar lists it at 7 p.m. on October 16 and sells it through Ticketmaster. No price is posted, which is usual for an arena tour, so buy from the venue's own ticket link rather than whatever resale page surfaces first in a search. The practical notes all come from the venue: arena guests park in Lot A and Deck 2, lots normally open two hours before the scheduled start, parking is paid, and the lot takes credit or debit only, no cash. Prepaid passes are sold through Ticketmaster and the Gas South District site and cover one vehicle each. Buy one, because the campus is not yours alone this weekend.

Saturday, Clayton: Commissioner Hambrick's Fall Festival, 1 to 4 p.m. on October 17 at Flat Shoals Park, 1915 Flat Shoals Road, Riverdale 30296. Commissioner Gail Hambrick runs it with Clayton County Parks and Recreation; the county's number for questions is 770-347-0201. Parking and shuttle service are not at the park. They are at North Clayton Middle School, 5517 West Fayetteville Road, College Park 30349. Note what the county does not say, too: no admission price appears on either page carrying this event, so do not turn up assuming it is free until you have asked. The shuttle is the detail worth reading twice. When a county moves parking to a middle school in another city, it is telling you the park's own lot will not hold the crowd. Park where they tell you to rather than circling Flat Shoals Road and leaving annoyed.

Saturday and Sunday, Gwinnett: the Atlanta Gladiators open their season at home against the Norfolk Admirals. Gas South District lists Saturday October 17 at 7 p.m. and Sunday October 18 at 3 p.m.; the team's own game pages put puck drop at 7:10 and 3:10. Same building, 6400 Sugarloaf Parkway. Tickets are required, and the team's page puts individual seats from $20 through Ticketmaster, multi-game plans from $115, and a Sunday package that includes a team flag. This is ECHL hockey, which is the point of it: a family of four gets into a real professional game for about what two tickets cost at most other pro sports in this market, and an opening night is the one home game a season where the building is genuinely full. Sunday at three is the easier one with small children. If you go Saturday night, know that Blizzard of Ozzy plays the Gas South Theater at 7:30 on the same campus, so the decks are absorbing two crowds at once.

If I had to pick one, it is Sugar Rush on Sunday afternoon. Free, outdoors, done by six, and a hundred-odd vendors inside a downtown small enough to walk end to end twice without tiring of it. Then take Saturday night at the arena, because $20 is a cheap way to find out whether minor-league hockey is your thing, and if it is you have found a winter habit that runs to spring. If your weekend sits in the south metro instead, do the Friday window at Stately Oaks and the fall festival on Saturday, in that order. One is Clayton's past kept carefully by people who volunteer for it; the other is Clayton now, on a Saturday afternoon in a county park. Two days, both counties explaining themselves.