Four Things Worth Doing This Weekend in Cobb and Gwinnett

This week the weekend list covers Cobb and Gwinnett. The first one of these covered Fulton and DeKalb, and the plan is to keep rotating until all five counties have come around. Four things below, Friday September 25 through Sunday September 27, every date, time, address and price taken off the organizer's own page. Check that link again before you drive anywhere. Times move, weather moves them, and a wasted forty-minute drive is the whole reason this list exists.

The North Georgia State Fair is at Jim R. Miller Park, 1345 Al Bishop Drive in Marietta, and it runs through October 4. This weekend the gates are open 4 p.m. to midnight Friday, 10 a.m. to midnight Saturday, and 12:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday. Admission at the gate is $15, $10 for seniors 55 and up with ID, and free for children 10 and under. Parking is free, and Cobb County says free KSU Big Owl shuttle buses run from Cobb Safety Village at 1345 Al Bishop Drive, 4 p.m. to closing Saturday and Sunday. Unlimited-ride wristbands are $30 Friday and Sunday and $35 Saturday, with Saturday's sold only until 5 p.m. Half-price gate tickets at $7.50 are sold at metro Atlanta O'Reilly Auto Parts stores through October 4, which is the cheapest way in if you happen to pass one.

Three rules worth knowing before you load the car: only clear bags and security-checked diaper bags get through the gate, there is no re-entry, and gate entry stops at 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 9 p.m. Sunday. Guests under 17 need a parent with them after 6 p.m. If you are bringing small kids, Sunday is the better day. The 12:30 open means the midway is calm for the first couple of hours, and the wristband is $5 less than Saturday's. If you are bringing teenagers, Friday night is the one they want, and the last two hours are the loudest of the week.

Downtown Duluth hands its center over to the Duluth Fall Festival on Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, based at the Duluth Festival Center, 3142 Hill Street NW. Admission is free and so are the shuttles, which run every 15 minutes from Peachtree Ridge High School at 1555 Old Peachtree Road in Suwanee, Chattahoochee Elementary at 2930 Albion Farm Road, and Duluth Middle School at 3200 Pleasant Hill Road, dropping at Coleman Middle School on Main Street. They run 7:45 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 7:45 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday, with Chattahoochee opening at 6:30 a.m. Sunday for the race. The parade steps off at 10 a.m. Saturday from Main Street near Coleman Middle, streets close by 9:45, and the shuttles pause from 9:45 to 11 while it runs.

Take the shuttle. On-street parking anywhere near the town green is gone by mid-morning Saturday and the walk back to wherever you improvised is longer than the shuttle ride. The festival wraps around the green and the blocks either side of Hill Street, which is exactly the compact, walkable core people have in mind when they ask me about Duluth, so this is a good weekend to see it on foot rather than through a windshield. The Duluth Donut Dash 5K starts at 8 a.m. Sunday and begins and ends at the Festival Center. It is an AJC Peachtree Road Race qualifier, listed at $40 on Active, with day-of packet pickup from 6:30 a.m. Register at the link rather than counting on signing up at the start line.

In Gwinnett's county seat, Around the World in the DTL takes over the Lawrenceville Lawn at 210 Luckie Street on Friday from 5 to 10 p.m. and Saturday from 2 to 10 p.m. Free, no ticket needed. The city runs it with the Atlanta International Night Market, so the draw is food, music and performances from a long list of countries, and Friday night doubles as the finale of the city's LIVE in the DTL concert series. The Lawn sits in the middle of downtown, which means the square's restaurants are a short walk away if a food line gets long, and it also means the free decks and lots around the square are your parking, not the handful of spaces beside the Lawn itself.

The quiet one on this list is Sunday afternoon in Marietta. The Earl and Rachel Smith Strand Theatre, 117 North Park Square, is screening Sparrows, the 1926 Mary Pickford picture, from 3 to 5 p.m., accompanied live on the theatre organ by house organist Ron Carter. Tickets are $18.80 and are sold through the theatre's own box office, so buy ahead rather than turning up. It is a genuinely good introduction to a silent film for a nine- or ten-year-old, because the plot is legible without a word of dialogue and the organ does the work a score would.

Park properly for that one. The free spaces around Glover Park are two-hour limited and enforced until 6 p.m., and a two-hour film with a pre-show does not fit in two hours. The Marietta City Hall deck at 211 Lawrence Street is free on Saturdays and Sundays with no validation, and the Cobb County Lawrence Street deck at 1 Haynes Street is open to the public around the clock, with the first 30 minutes free and four to six hours at $7.

If I could only do one, it is the Duluth Fall Festival on Sunday morning. Be parked at Peachtree Ridge by 8:30, take the shuttle in, and be on Hill Street when the booths open at 9. The two hours before noon on Sunday are the only stretch of the whole weekend where you can see the town instead of the back of somebody's head, and if you want a full day out of two counties from there, it is a straight run across to Marietta Square in time for the 3 o'clock film.