On the morning of September 12, Clemmons splits in two. At the Jerry Long Family YMCA on South Peace Haven Road, the Village of Clemmons Oktoberfest opens at 8 a.m. alongside the Dirty Dozen 5K and Fun Run obstacle mud course, with a beer pit, a farmers market table, and a Touch-a-Truck lineup for kids, all free to walk into. Across town at Be Kind Coffee Co. on Clemmons Road, the Wandering Shire Book Market opens at 10 a.m. in the courtyard the owners decorated in bees, running right through the back half of the Oktoberfest morning. Same town, same window of hours, two rooms full of neighbors who won't cross paths until Monday.
That collision is the real story of September in Clemmons. This isn't a town with one festival street where the whole calendar funnels through a single block. It's a town where the month gets distributed across four buildings that have nothing to do with each other: a YMCA, a golf course, a church, and a coffee shop. Which Saturday belongs to you depends less on what's happening and more on which building already has your loyalty.
The Saturday That Asks You To Choose
The YMCA event is the loud one. Dirty Dozen runners crawl through mud and climb obstacles for a 5K or a shorter fun run, then everyone funnels into the same lot for the Oktoberfest side of the morning, games and food and the beer pit that's become the September anchor for families who've done this run before. It's a YMCA event through and through, tied to the Y's mission of community fitness rather than any single downtown or town square.
The coffee shop event is quieter and smaller by design. Be Kind Coffee Co. was built by a mother-daughter team, Natalie and Amanda Gogolak, as a place that felt like a family kitchen table rather than a chain storefront, and the Wandering Shire Book Market fits that instinct: local vendors, a courtyard, scratch-made pastries, and a Saturday that rewards showing up slowly instead of running through it.
Neither event references the other. Neither needs to. That's the pattern worth noticing: Clemmons doesn't organize its calendar around a shared center. It organizes around institutions that already have their own regulars, and September just happens to be the month when several of those institutions run their biggest events at once.
| Date | Event | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| Fri, Sept 11 | Clemmons Food Pantry "Drive Away Hunger" Golf Tournament | Tanglewood Championship Course |
| Sat, Sept 12, 8 a.m. | Dirty Dozen 5K, Fun Run & Village of Clemmons Oktoberfest | Jerry Long Family YMCA |
| Sat, Sept 12, 10 a.m. | Wandering Shire Book Market | Be Kind Coffee Co. |
| Sat, Sept 19, 8:30 a.m. | Athena's Run for GYN Cancers 5K | Tanglewood Park |
| Sat, Sept 26 | Middle Eastern Festival | Bible Church of Clemmons |
Two Weekends, One Golf Course
Tanglewood Park does double duty this month, hosting a charity golf tournament on Friday the 11th and a 5K road race on the 19th, and that's not unusual for a park with this much land to give away. The Reynolds family willed all 1,100 acres to the citizens of Forsyth County in 1951, and the Championship Course, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., once hosted the 1974 PGA Championship, where Lee Trevino edged out Jack Nicklaus by a single stroke. The park sits between Clemmons and Bermuda Run along the Yadkin River, and technically it belongs to the whole county, not just the town.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Tanglewood isn't a Clemmons amenity the way the YMCA or Be Kind Coffee Co. are. It's a shared regional space that happens to sit inside Clemmons's borders, which means its calendar reflects countywide causes, a food pantry fundraiser one week, a cancer research run the next, rather than anything specifically Clemmons-branded. Residents get the benefit of an 1,100-acre park without the town having to program it. The trade is that Tanglewood's events feel a step removed from the rest of the month, arriving from outside rather than growing out of a Clemmons institution the way the book market or the Oktoberfest do.
The Festival That Stands Alone
Late in the month, on Saturday the 26th, the Middle Eastern Festival takes over Bible Church of Clemmons on Harper Road, with food, live music, and cultural dance performances open to the public. Unlike the September 12th collision, this one has the calendar to itself. No competing event pulls attention the same day, which means it functions less like a scheduling puzzle and more like the month's one unhurried afternoon.
It's also the clearest example of the pattern holding: a church runs a cultural festival the same way a coffee shop runs a book market and a YMCA runs a mud run. Each institution stages the event that fits its own community, on its own timeline, without needing to coordinate with the others. Nobody in Clemmons is managing a shared September calendar. Four buildings are managing four separate ones, and residents pick their way through based on which building they already trust.
What You Do When Nothing's Scheduled
Strip away the festivals and the 5Ks, and most Saturdays in Clemmons don't have an event at all, which is where Village Point Greenway does its quieter work. The paved loop runs nearly three-quarters of a mile around Village Point Lake, crossing three wooden bridges and passing a wheelchair-accessible fishing pier stocked with largemouth bass, bluegill, and catfish. It's flat enough for strollers, wide enough for dogs on a leash, and short enough to walk twice before lunch.
The greenway doesn't compete with the festival calendar because it isn't trying to. It's the default, the thing you do on the Saturdays that don't have a Dirty Dozen or a book market attached, which is most of them. If Tanglewood represents the county showing up inside Clemmons and the YMCA, the church, and the coffee shop represent Clemmons's own institutions running their own events, the greenway is the one piece of infrastructure built purely for the in-between days.
Where The Month Ends Up
For a meal after any of these mornings, Clemmons added a new option late last year at 6412 Sessions Court: Cozumel Seafood and Mexican Kitchen, run by manager Stephanie Aguirre-Romo. The menu runs nine pages deep with a heavier lean toward seafood than most Mexican kitchens in the area attempt, including aguachile verde, Cozumel enchiladas, and Veracruz fajitas, alongside a drink list built around fresh horchata and fruit frescas in watermelon, pineapple, melon, and jamaica. It's the kind of addition that doesn't anchor a festival or a 5K but quietly becomes the place people land afterward, which is its own kind of local staying power.
That's the shape of Clemmons in September: four institutions running four separate calendars, a regional park doing double duty for two of its own causes, and a greenway absorbing everyone on the days nothing else is scheduled. No single street ties it together. The building you already know is the one that decides your Saturday.
Zach Dawson has spent enough Saturdays in this town to know which building belongs to which crowd, and when a move into or around Clemmons is next on your calendar, that kind of local read is worth having in your corner. Reach out to Zach Dawson to talk through what's next.
