The shape of this long weekend is simple: the sun is loaded into the front of it. Friday is forecast sunny and near 70, Saturday mostly sunny in the mid 60s, and then Sunday clouds up with showers arriving late and hanging around for a wet Columbus Day Monday. So build the outdoor plans for Friday and Saturday, keep a rain option in your back pocket for Monday, and know that the biggest single event of the weekend, Huntington's four-day Fall Festival at Heckscher Park, already got its own full story here this week. Beyond Heckscher, here are six plans worth the drive.

Montauk ladles out its 45th fall festival

The season's last great excuse to drive to The End lands Saturday and Sunday, October 10 and 11, when the Montauk Fall Festival takes over the village green for its 45th year. The centerpiece is Saturday's clam chowder contest, where more than twenty local kitchens each cook a vat, the entries go in unmarked so nobody can vote for a friend, and festivalgoers sample their way across the tables while the judges argue. Around it: farm stands, local vendors, live music and a kids' corner, all free to wander. Montauk in mid October is the town with its summer costume off, and the locals will tell you it is the best version.

A hundred food vendors park at Tanger for four days

The Famous Food Festival sets up at Tanger Outlets Deer Park, on The Arches Circle, from Friday through Monday, October 9 to 12. The pitch is volume: more than 100 vendors working food from around the world, which makes it the rare event where everyone in the car wins the argument about lunch. Entry is ticketed and the organizers are blunt that tickets are limited, so book ahead rather than betting on the gate. It is also the one big outdoor event of the weekend that runs into Monday, so if the holiday itself is your only free day, this is the plan that still works, as long as you dress for the forecast.

Apple season peaks at a 70-year-old festival in Mill Neck

The Mill Neck Apple Festival turns 70 this year, and it runs Saturday and Sunday on the grounds of Mill Neck Manor, the Gold Coast estate on Frost Mill Road. Apples by the bag, cider, fall food, craft vendors and a manor lawn that does half the work of the day for you. The festival is the signature fundraiser for the Mill Neck Family of Organizations, which serves deaf and hard-of-hearing children, so the money follows the apples somewhere that matters. Go Saturday if you can: the grounds are the point, and Saturday has the better sky.

Two theaters, one hit-maker, swap nights

Riverhead and Port Washington are effectively trading programs this weekend. Five for Fighting, the John Ondrasik project behind Superman and 100 Years, plays The Suffolk in Riverhead on Friday at 8 p.m. with a string quartet, then plays Landmark on Main Street in Port Washington on Saturday at 8. Meanwhile Landmark opens its Friday to Broadway's Melissa Errico, a Manhasset product singing her I Can Dream, Can't I? program, and The Suffolk gives Saturday to The Machine, the long-running Pink Floyd tribute. Whichever harbor town is closer to you, there is a real show in it both nights.

Stony Brook: last call on the water, scarecrows on Main Street

Two clocks are running in Stony Brook Village. The Discovery Wetlands Cruise, the pontoon ride through the salt marsh off West Meadow Creek, makes its final runs of the season through Sunday, October 11, and a fall cruise through that marsh is a different animal from a July one: quieter, birdier, better light. Back on Main Street, the village's 36th annual scarecrow competition is up through Halloween, with dozens of entries lining the Village Center and voting free to anyone who strolls it. Cruise, chowder at the harbor, scarecrow ballot: that is a full afternoon that costs almost nothing.

The pumpkins are still rising in Wheatley Heights

If you have not yet walked RISE of the Jack O'Lanterns at the Usdan camp on Colonial Springs Road, this is the weekend to fix that, while the carvings are fresh and before the closing-weeks crowds arrive. Thousands of hand-carved, illuminated pumpkins line a mile of woodland trail, open 21 select nights through November 1. It sells out nearly every year and tickets are advance-only, so buy the timed slot before you get in the car.

The honest advice for the weekend: spend Friday and Saturday outside, aim Sunday morning at whatever is left on the list, and let Monday be the diner-breakfast, movie-matinee day the forecast says it wants to be. The chowder, the apples and the salt marsh will not wait for the next long weekend. The rain can have Monday.