Thursday night at eight, an Ijams Park naturalist takes a group out onto the trails to look up. The program is called Ijams After Dark: All About Bats, it runs an hour and a half, and the premise is that the animals doing the most work over South Knoxville after sunset are the ones almost nobody has ever knowingly looked at.

★The bat house is the real headliner

Out on the property there is a structure ten feet by twelve, fitted inside with vertical plywood slats and a walkway for the people who monitor it. It was built to hold up to a hundred thousand Brazilian free-tailed bats while they roost, rest and raise their young. It stands on ground that held industrial lime kilns until the early 1970s, which is the whole story of this park in one sentence: a place that was used hard, then handed back.

★What the night actually involves

You learn to tell species apart as they pass overhead, and you stop at blacklight stations, where a violet lamp on a patch of forest turns up an entire layer of insects and lichens that simply is not visible at noon. Expect up to a mile and a half of walking over rocks, roots and gravel, with stops along the way — real shoes, not sandals. Fifteen dollars, ages ten and up, and registration is required in advance.

★One rule, stated plainly

Never touch a bat. The park is blunt about it and so are we; these are protected wild animals and the reason for the rule is rabies. Watch from behind the fence at the observation area, keep your distance, and let the naturalist do the pointing.

Friday's film on the lawn is All Dogs Go to Heaven, Don Bluth's 1989 cartoon about a German shepherd running a casino, which is remembered by most people who saw it young as being considerably heavier than they were promised. Bring the kids anyway. Bring the dog, too — leashed dogs are welcome at these, and the sight of a lawn full of them watching this particular movie is worth the ticket on its own.

★How the evening runs

Doors open at seven on the Visitor Center lawn and the film starts when it actually gets dark, which by early September is closer to half past eight than the nine o'clock of midsummer. That first hour is for eating: food trucks and the park's beer garden handle dinner and drinks. No coolers, no outside alcohol.

★Tickets, and the heat

Twelve dollars a head, ten if you're a member of Ijams Park or Central Cinema, and space per screening is limited enough that buying ahead is the safer move. Friday's high is forecast near 96, so the lawn at seven will still be warm — bring more water than you think you need, and the sunset will do the rest of the work.

Ten days ago the room at 115 Mimosa Ave, a few hundred yards off Blount Avenue, stopped being Mimosas and became Puckers Sports Grill. We wrote then that the quiet days after it opened were the last ones the building would get before a game day. That game day is Saturday, and the room is better positioned for it than a new arrival has any right to be.

★They have done this a long time

Puckers isn't a new idea being tried out on us. Kennedy Concepts has run the original on the Parkway in Gatlinburg since 1999, and it is a genuinely good version of the form — the wings are worth ordering, the screens are placed so you can actually watch from anywhere, and the service is quick and friendly in a way sports bars often are not. It is a room dressed to be noticed. The Knoxville version is pitched as the grown-up edit of that: chef-driven plates and a real cocktail list attached to the same instincts.

★The patio is the argument

Stand up on the patio and Neyland is right there across the water — close enough that the stadium is part of the view rather than a landmark you go looking for. Better than that, this is on the path. The crowd on foot comes up Chapman Highway and over the Henley Street Bridge, so the whole procession passes in front of you: the orange, the coolers, the slow drift toward kickoff. Watching a hundred thousand people walk to a game, from a chair, with a drink, is its own afternoon — and it is available whether or not you have a ticket.

★Saturday morning is the move

Doors open at nine on Saturday and stay open until ten at night, which puts a long, unhurried brunch in front of a 3:30 kickoff. The Mimosas brunch dishes people actually turned up for kept their place on the menu, so that part of the old room survives intact. They are taking reservations through Resy, and for a first home game with a nine o'clock open, booking one is the obvious move rather than an optional refinement. Weekdays are eleven to nine, Sunday nine to nine.

Kern's has decided what it wants to be on a Tennessee Saturday, and unusually for this kind of thing, it has put the numbers on its own website rather than making you email somebody.

★What the money buys

Three hundred dollars a game reserves a private section of the lawn patio for up to twenty people: a television, two couches, two cocktail tables, a canopy over the top, a sign with your name on it, and one reserved space in the Kern's lot — that is a space at Kern's, for getting to Kern's, and has nothing to do with parking at the stadium. Twenty-five hundred takes the small rooftop patio upstairs for as many as seventy-five, with the boundaries and signage handled. Catering and drink packages are added on top, redeemable at the bar.

★Who this is honestly for

Not the couple looking for a table. These are group packages with a signed agreement, a quarter of it down at booking, and a final headcount due two weeks ahead, which puts Saturday's game past the deadline already. It's built for the birthday, the reunion, the office. If that's the autumn you're planning, the prices being public is a real kindness.

★And if you just want to turn up

You still can. The hall is open eight in the morning to eleven at night on Saturday, the vendors are all running, and nobody charges you to walk in and find a screen. The packages are the upgrade, not the price of admission.

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

★What actually happens

Some weeks a hands-on, nature-inspired project comes with it. Other weeks the story finishes and the kids simply go — dig, climb, roam, meet somebody. Both versions work. Bring a blanket if you want to sit down; bring nothing if you don't.

★The timing is the gift this week

Saturday is forecast near 95 and the roads start filling around midday. This runs in the shade, in the cool half of the day, costs nothing, and hands your morning back to you at noon with the whole afternoon still unspent. If you have small kids and a Saturday to fill, it is the easiest good decision on the page.

Hi-Wire's Knoxville taproom takes up 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 sits 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, from 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, murals on every wall, and two outdoor decks — one covered, 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.

★A note on the roof deck

Thursday's forecast high is near 97. The rooftop is the best seat in the building for about eleven months of the year, and this is not one of those days until the sun is well down — the indoor floor is enormous, and that is where the pinball is anyway. Hi-Wire's Knoxville events page still wasn't loading anything publicly as of Tuesday, so a one-off on their calendar may not be visible; the hours and the standing Thursday deals above come from the taproom's own page.

Trailhead Beer Market is further along the same street as Alliance Brewing and the Pink Cactus — you keep straight through the new traffic circle at the end of Sevier Avenue and it is one block down, on the bank of the Tennessee River. South Knoxville's first beer market, and its whole identity is in the name: it sits in the back yard of both Ijams Park and the roughly seventy miles of trail that make up the Urban Wilderness. People arrive on bikes still wearing the dust.

★The Thursday game

Every Thursday at seven the Knox Trivia Guys set up and run a round. It costs nothing to play, you do not need to arrive with a full team, and the format rewards the person who knows one strange thing very well over the person who knows everything a little. Communal tables, a full bar, and the Gato Peligroso truck handling food.

★Why we're putting it here this week

Thursday's high is forecast near 97, which rules out most of what this end of Sevier Avenue is good for until the sun goes down. A free, indoor, seven-o'clock reason to leave the house is worth more than usual on a day like that — and if the heat does break for an hour, the water is right there.

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.

★The extra day

Labor Day falls on Monday the 7th, and Margarita Monday is a standing fixture rather than a holiday special — eight-dollar house margaritas all day, with the dollar-off window from four to six. If the weekend gets eaten by the traffic on Saturday, the deal is still there when everyone has gone home.