Five Things Worth Doing This Weekend in DeKalb and Cobb

The weekend list works through the five metro counties two at a time. Fulton and DeKalb came first, then Cobb and Gwinnett, then Clayton and Fulton, so this week it is DeKalb and Cobb, Friday October 9 through Sunday October 11. Five things below. Every date, time, address and price came off the organizer's or the venue's own page this week. Check that page again before you drive anywhere, because times move and weather moves them.

Friday, DeKalb: Fernbank After Dark. 7 to 11 p.m. at Fernbank Museum, 767 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta 30307. Tickets are $18.95 for members and $23.95 for everyone else when bought online, and the museum adds $3 per ticket at the box office or over the phone. This one is 21 and up, with no exceptions, so it is not a family night. Fernbank runs it on the second Friday of every month and it is the same museum you would take kids to on a Saturday, minus the kids. Worth knowing before you go: the museum itself says parking is not guaranteed and recommends rideshare. That is Clifton Road talking. It is a two-lane corridor carrying Emory and the CDC, it backs up even on a Friday night, and the lot is finite. Druid Hills is a pleasant place to be stuck, but you will still be stuck.

Friday, Cobb: the Midnight Wake at the William Root House. 11 p.m. to midnight on October 9 at 80 North Marietta Parkway NW, Marietta 30060. It is $50 a person, has to be bought in advance, and is restricted to ages 12 and up. The Root House is a house museum from the 1840s, owned and operated by Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society, and every October it is dressed for a Victorian funeral because Hannah Root's father, Leonard Simpson, died in the house in October 1856. The wake is the late-night version of that. If $50 and a weeknight-length window after 11 p.m. is more than you want, the funeral exhibit itself runs October 1 through 31 during regular museum hours and is included with regular admission. The house sits at the edge of Marietta Square, so you can park once and walk to the rest of it.

Saturday, DeKalb: Oakhurst Porchfest. Noon to 7 p.m. on October 10, across the Oakhurst neighborhood in the southwest corner of Decatur. Free, no ticket, roughly 200 acts on roughly 200 front porches inside about a square mile. It has run since 2015. Read the organizers' own transport advice before you plan anything, because they are blunt about it: driving is, in their words, a really bad idea, parking is crazy hard, and the streets are not closed to traffic. They point people to the MARTA Blue Line and the East Lake station, to the Stone Mountain PATH on a bike, and to rideshare with geofenced drop-off points. Take them at their word. This is a neighborhood of narrow residential streets that absorbs a few thousand extra people for an afternoon, and the people who live there are the ones lending you their porches.

Saturday and Sunday, Cobb: Chalktoberfest on Marietta Square. Saturday October 10 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday October 11 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., on East Park Square, Marietta 30060. Watching more than 80 chalk artists work the pavement is free and open to anyone. The craft beer and wine tasting is Saturday only, noon to 5 p.m., and is a separate paid ticket you should buy from the festival's own page rather than at the gate. The whole thing is a fundraiser for the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art at 30 Atlanta Street SE, which is a block away and worth the detour while you are there. Parking is the downtown decks and street spaces, and fees may apply, so budget for it. Sunday is the calmer day and the artwork is finished by then, which is the better trade if you are bringing small children or a stroller.

Sunday, DeKalb: the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area turns 20. 2 to 6 p.m. on October 11 at the Vaughters' Farm trail head, 3366 Klondike Road, Stonecrest 30038. Free, no registration required. Congress designated the heritage area in 2006. It covers about 40,000 acres across DeKalb, Rockdale and Henry, and the alliance says roughly 100,000 people live inside its boundary. The party is live blues and bluegrass, free ice cream, food vendors, guided walks, a pop-up museum in the historic barn and animal ambassadors from the AWARE Wildlife Center. If you have only ever driven past the Klondike Road exit on your way somewhere else, this is the cheapest way to find out what is back there. Four free hours outdoors in east DeKalb, with the people who have spent twenty years keeping it that way standing right there to answer questions, is a better introduction to that side of the county than anything I could write.

If I had to pick one, it is Porchfest, and I would take the train. Two hundred porches inside a square mile is a format you cannot really get wrong, you can leave whenever you like, and arriving at East Lake station on the Blue Line removes the only part of the day that goes badly. Then keep Sunday open for Arabia Mountain. Free, outdoors, finished by six, and it will tell you more about east DeKalb in four hours than a month of driving around it.