Augusta Quarry is the swimming-hole quarry — the one off Chapman Highway inside Fort Dickerson Park, with the green water and the sheer rock wall that people drive past for years before they finally pull in. For three nights this summer Knoxville Opera has put a stage at the bottom of it. Thursday is the last of the three.

★What an hour of it sounds like

The program is called Heroes & Adventures, and the pitch is deliberately unfussy: opera, musical theatre, and audience favorites, sung by working professionals against a hundred feet of limestone. Pirates, princesses, rogues and dreamers. If your entire experience of opera is a cartoon Viking helmet, this is the version designed to fix that — one hour, outdoors, in a park, with nobody checking whether you know the words.

★The practical part

Seven to eight, admission listed at five dollars, all ages. Bring a lawn chair or a blanket; the ground out there is grass and gravel. And it finishes early enough that you can be home with your head tipped back by half past nine, which is when the other thing on Thursday's schedule starts.

Puckers Sports Grill Knoxville opened its doors Wednesday morning at 115 Mimosa Ave, a few hundred yards off Blount Avenue, in the room that was Mimosas right up until Tuesday night. This weekend is its first.

★Where it came from

Puckers isn't new — it's just new here. Kennedy Concepts has run the original on the Parkway in Gatlinburg since 1999, and it's the kind of place people describe by its television count before they describe the food. The Knoxville version is pitched as the grown-up take on that: chef-driven plates, a real cocktail list, and a room built to hold a crowd that has somewhere to be at 3:30 on a Saturday.

★If you came for the brunch

It's still there. The Mimosas dishes people actually turned up for kept their place on the new menu, and the company has said the Mimosas concept itself is expected to come back somewhere down the line. So this reads less like a closing than a swap — the same kitchen, pointed at a different kind of Saturday.

★Why this weekend, specifically

Tennessee opens at home against Furman on September 5 at 3:30, and this building sits close enough to Neyland that you can hear the stadium from the patio. That makes these four days the last quiet ones the room gets. If you want to see it before it has to prove itself on a game day, go now. Posted hours for the Knoxville location weren't up as of Tuesday, so call ahead if you're building a plan around it.

Kern's has a roof, and Thursday night somebody is finally doing the obvious thing with it. Alchemy Cigar Lounge is running an evening called Sundresses and Seersuckers up there, seven to nine, forty dollars a ticket.

★What forty dollars buys

An Angel's Envy tasting, a welcome cocktail on arrival, a cigar paired to what you're drinking, light bites and a menu built for the night. It is unapologetically a dress-up occasion — the name is also the instruction — which is a rarer invitation in South Knoxville than you'd think.

★The nice absurdity of it

Worth pausing on the setting. This is a bourbon-and-cigar evening held on top of a building that spent most of the last century making sandwich bread for East Tennessee. The ovens are gone, the brick isn't, and now there's a bar where the roofline used to just be a roofline. Tickets go through the host.

Hi-Wire's Knoxville taproom occupies the whole second floor of the building at 2020 Barber Street, a block off Sevier Avenue, and Thursday is the day it makes its strongest case: the standing pint night runs on top of an all-day happy hour, so the discount doesn't wait for an evening window.

★What's up there

Twenty Hi-Wire taps — flagships through sour and wild ales — plus draft cocktails, liquor slushies, wine, cider, and non-alcoholic options for whoever drove. Ping pong, foosball, and a Stern pinball machine. Ten thousand square feet of room, murals on every wall, and two outdoor decks, one covered and one on the roof with the view.

★Dinner solves itself

There's no kitchen upstairs and there doesn't need to be: you order from Redbud Kitchen on the ground floor, they text you, you carry it back up. Outside food is welcome too, just not outside drinks. Doors at three, last call at ten.

★One caveat

Hi-Wire's own Knoxville events page was failing to load all week, so if the taproom has added a one-off to its calendar it may not be showing publicly. The hours and the standing Thursday deals above come from the taproom's own page and Visit Knoxville's listing.

Friday's pick on the lawn is Napoleon Dynamite, which is either a cult classic or a documentary about somebody in your family, depending on where you grew up. Ijams Park and Central Cinema have been running Movies Under the Stars for fourteen summers now, and the format has never needed improving: a screen on the grass, trees on three sides, and the film starting whenever it actually gets dark — around 8:45 this time of year.

★How the evening runs

Doors open at seven on the Visitor Center lawn, which gives you an hour and change to eat before anything starts. Food trucks and the Ijams Park beer garden handle dinner, snacks and drinks. No coolers and no outside alcohol. Dogs are welcome as long as they stay leashed.

★Tickets and the fine print

Twelve dollars a head, ten if you're an Ijams Park or Central Cinema member. Space per screening is limited and walk-up tickets aren't guaranteed, so buying ahead is the safer move. If the weather turns, the park posts a rain plan on the event page and its socials rather than cancelling outright.

The premise of goat yoga has not changed since the first person thought of it, and it does not need to: you lay out a mat, you begin an all-levels class, and then small goats walk across you. Whatever you were going to accomplish spiritually is gone by minute four, and that turns out to be the point.

★Saturday morning at the bakery

It runs 8:30 to 10:30 at Kern's, which is a genuinely good setting for it — the old bakery campus has the room, and when the class is over the food hall, the coffee and the bar are all right there, so brunch requires no second decision. Thirty-five dollars for adults and twenty-five for kids five to twelve, priced like something a family does together rather than a novelty for one person.

★One thing to check first

The listing for this comes through Visit Knoxville, and Kern's own online events calendar has been coming up empty all week. If you're driving in specifically for it, a quick call or a look at Kern's socials before you leave is worth the thirty seconds.

The Ijams Nature Playscape sits out at Mead's Quarry — logs and stumps and dirt arranged so that a four-year-old can climb the whole thing without anybody having to use the word playground. Every Saturday from ten to noon, somebody sits down out there in a shady spot and reads a story out loud.

★What actually happens

Some weeks there's a hands-on, nature-inspired project attached. Other weeks the story ends and the kids just go — roam, dig, climb, meet somebody. Both versions work. Bring a blanket if you want to sit; bring nothing if you don't.

★Why it's on this page

Most of what's worth doing this weekend has a ticket price and a start time you have to plan around. This one costs nothing, repeats every week, and asks only that you show up before noon. If you have small kids and a Saturday to fill, it's the easiest good decision available.

The Sunset Series is the thing Ijams Park does on its stone patio when the light goes long — small, close-up evenings of music, comedy, storytelling and spoken word, with maybe fifty people and no real barrier between the performer and the front row. Saturday's is comedy.

★Who's on

Tiny Stage Comedy is running The Sunflower Comedy Show as its end-of-summer date: an hour of stand-up and poetry from Savannah Wolfgram, Rowan Young, Ali Shrektor, Gail Grantham, Clinton Ricks and Katelyn Hillen, with a poetry set worked in. It's a mix of Knoxville comics who have been at it a while and people newer to a microphone, which is generally when this format is at its best.

★Before you go

Half past seven to half past eight, on the back patio, beer garden open. If the weather turns it moves inside rather than cancelling. One genuine caution: as of Tuesday the park's page listed the show but had not yet put tickets on sale, so check the event page before you make the drive out Island Home.

The moon that goes dark on Thursday is full and back to itself by Saturday, and Ijams Park has a guided walk booked underneath it. It's about an hour and a half on the trails after sunset with a naturalist doing the talking — the night sky, the animals that only come out for it, and the plants and rock formations that read completely differently in the dark.

★What they hand you at the trailhead

Blacklights and headlamps, which is more interesting than it sounds — a blacklight on the right patch of forest floor turns up scorpions and lichens and a whole layer of things that are simply invisible at noon. The program is built for ages ten and up, and you should expect up to two miles over uneven ground, so wear real shoes. Everyone fills out an assumption-of-risk form once a calendar year; if you've done one for another Ijams Park program in 2026, you're covered.

★Book it, because the water version is gone

The park also runs guided Full Moon Paddles out of Ijams River Landing on Island Home Pike, 8:30 to 10:30 both Friday and Saturday, kayaks and life jackets included at $45 a seat — and both nights are sold out. The hike was still taking registrations as of Tuesday. If the paddle was the one you wanted, the next is on the calendar for September 26, and this weekend is your argument for booking it early.

Sunday afternoon at Ijams Park, the Creative Series runs a three-hour workshop on setting dried flowers in resin and turning the result into jewelry. Two to five, registration required, and you walk out with the thing you made.

★Why it's a good closing move for a weekend

It's a craft that looks harder than it is and produces something durable — pressed wildflowers and fern suspended clear, a pendant that keeps one specific August inside it. Three hours is enough time to do it badly once and then well, which is the correct length for a workshop of this kind.

★If you want the whole day out there

Hope Irwin's Self Care Sunday yoga runs at 11:30 the same morning at the park, which makes a full Sunday on Island Home Avenue available to anyone who wants to build one.

Earl's sits at 610 Waterfront Drive, down where Suttree Landing meets the water, and it runs a different special every single day. Thursday it's ten-dollar Patrón mango margaritas from four to six; Friday the same window gets nine-dollar spicy pineapple ones. Both days carry a dollar off liquor, beer, and wine.

★Then the all-day rungs

Saturday the clock goes away: eight-dollar house margaritas all day, doors 10:30 to 11. Sunday is seven-dollar mimosas and Bloody Marys, also all day, until ten. It's a straight walk down from Sevier Avenue, the tables face open water, and the river handles the entertainment.