The old bakery on Kern's Rising Way has three nights of music booked and is charging for exactly none of it. It is the rare weekend where the plan can just be "go to Kern's" and the building sorts out the rest.

★Friday: Stax first, then boots

Scruffy City Soul Machine opens the evening at six — a Knoxville soul and funk outfit built on the golden run of the sixties and seventies, which in practice means Aretha, Stevie, Otis, and a horn section that does not need a microphone to reach the back of the hall. At eight the floor changes hands: the Ho'Down Social, line and country dancing run by Cowtown Studio, goes until eleven. It's free, it's for every skill level, and there is no dress code — which is a polite way of saying nobody is checking your boots.

★Saturday and Sunday: the kids take the stage

Then the weekend hands the microphone over. School of Rock brings more than 150 students — kids of all ages — to play across two full days, starting 11:30 Saturday morning and running through seven o'clock Sunday evening. Admission is free. It is loud, it is unpolished in the specific way that makes live music worth leaving the house for, and somewhere in there a nine-year-old is going to land a guitar solo in front of a room full of strangers.

★The practical part

Kern's advantage for a weekend like this is the building itself: the food hall vendors, the coffee, and the bar are all already there, so you can arrive without a plan and stay as long as the set list holds. Park on campus and walk in.

Somewhere along the way, summer camp became a thing that only happens to people under twelve. Ijams Park has decided that was an oversight. Re-Discovery Camp runs Friday evening through Sunday afternoon and is open to anyone eighteen and older — bring a partner, bring a friend, or come alone and meet the rest of the cabin.

★What three days actually looks like

Friday opens with dinner and an evening choice of caving or a herping hike — that's going out after dark to find frogs and snakes, and it is exactly as good as it sounds. Saturday stacks welcome games, animal ambassador visits, arts and crafts, wilderness skills, and kayaking, then puts everyone around a campfire with s'mores. Saturday night you sleep on the grounds under the trees; bring a tent and a sleeping pad, or ask and the park will sort out gear. Sunday is breakfast, then yoga or a swim in the quarry, a naturalist hike, lunch, and an optional run through the treetops on the Navitat course.

★The cost, plainly

The full weekend is $300 a person and the Saturday-to-Sunday version is $210, with the treetop add-on another $35. That covers Friday dinner, Saturday dinner and s'mores, and Sunday breakfast and lunch — Saturday's breakfast and lunch are on you. Registration runs through the park's camp registration site, and questions go to publicprograms@ijams.org.

★If a whole weekend is too much weekend

The park's standing Saturday storytelling runs 10 to noon at the Nature Playscape out at Mead's Quarry, and it's free — small kids, blankets, and somebody reading out loud under the trees. Sunday, Hope Irwin's Self Care Sunday yoga starts at 11:30. Neither one asks anything of you but showing up.

Sevier Avenue and the streets hanging off it are having the sort of weekend that doesn't announce itself — no festival, no headliner, just four days of small things worth walking to.

★Thursday: read something, drink something cheap

Fly by Night hosts Pages & Pours from 5:30 to 9 — bring whatever you're reading and share a room with people doing the same, which is a lower-stakes proposition than a book club and about twice as pleasant. They ask that you RSVP. A few blocks over, Hi-Wire's standing Thursday pint night puts drafts at four dollars.

★Saturday: a book fair with a foster program attached

Then the weekend's best idea. Fairy Tales & Fuzzy Tails runs 2 to 6 at Hi-Wire on Barber Street — a grown-up book fair crossed with a pet adoption event, which is to say tables of books, adoptable animals in the room, and a genuine risk of going home with more than you planned. Yoga holds down eleven o'clock that morning if you want to earn the afternoon.

★Sunday: yoga, then glass

Yoga runs 11 to noon again Sunday, and at two the taproom turns into a workshop — a two-hour stained glass class, registration required, ending at four with something you made yourself. It is a good closing move for a weekend, and a better one than scrolling.

★And two rooms that need no plan at all

The students are back this week, so it's worth saying plainly: SouthSide Garage, the food truck park at 1014 Sevier Ave, and Trailhead Beer Market over on Island Home Avenue are both open all weekend with nothing scheduled at either — which is exactly the point when you just need somewhere to land.

Most of what's worth doing in South Knoxville this weekend has a start time attached to it. The Pink Cactus doesn't, and that turns out to be its whole appeal — a big pink house on Sevier Avenue that you can simply walk into when the rest of the plan falls through.

★The rooms upstairs

The draw is private karaoke — actual closed rooms, booked by the hour, sized for anywhere from two people to twenty. The house claims to be the only place in Knoxville doing it, and the pitch is straightforward: you get the playlist and the microphone without the part where a stranger at the bar watches you attempt Whitney. Walk-ins are taken, but weekends fill, so reserving online is the safer move.

★And the rest of the house

Downstairs is a bar with Latin-inspired food and a lounge that doesn't require you to sing for your supper. Out front there's a covered patio with yard games. It's all ages until nine o'clock, which makes the early evening a real option for families, and 21-and-up after that when the room changes character.

★Where to leave the car

There's no lot of its own. The house points people to the free parking at Suttree Landing Park — search the "Suttree Landing Park Pavilion and Restroom" lot and walk the block and a half, or find a spot on the street nearby. Which means you can park at the river, take the walk up, and let the evening decide itself.

One of the largest undeveloped pieces of land left on Sevier Avenue now has a decision attached to it. Last Thursday the Knoxville-Knox County Planning Commission approved a revised plan to turn the old Kerbela Shriners temple site — 5.7 acres where Sevier meets Dawson Street, right up against the Kern's campus — into a 225-apartment community for residents 55 and over.

★What the neighborhood got in the final draft

The plan had been through five agendas since February, with commissioners pressing repeatedly on a single question: how much of the finished site would actually belong to the public. The approved version answers it in concrete terms. There's a public plaza at the corner of Dawson and Sevier, landscaped and built to hold food trucks. There's an east-west public path across the property connecting toward the South Waterfront, and a north-south breezeway through it. Because the ground drops away at grades reaching 40 percent, the plan adds an accessible elevator alongside exterior stairs. And a piece of the land goes to the City of Knoxville outright.

★What happens now

CR Endeavors moves into design, permitting and the regulatory work that follows, in coordination with the city — so nothing changes on the ground this month. Developer Ryan Robertson said the team had spent "a lot of time listening" over the months of revisions. For a corridor that has spent a decade arguing about what it wants to become, this is the biggest single answer it has given yet.

Earl's sits at 610 Waterfront Drive, down where Suttree Landing meets the water, and it runs a different special every single day — which turns a weekend into a small planning exercise. 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. Walk down from Sevier Avenue, take a table where you can see the water, and let the river handle the entertainment.