Odenton's Summer, Finally On Two Wheels
July 23, 2026
July 23, 2026
For two decades, the WB&A Trail ended at the Patuxent River. You could ride south from Odenton Road, coast past Piney Orchard, wind through the wooded edge of Two Rivers, and then arrive at a riverbank with nowhere to go. The bridge that was supposed to close the gap had been stuck in property disputes since the early 2000s. Residents who wanted to ride into Bowie loaded bikes onto a car.
That ended in 2025. The 530-foot pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the Patuxent finally opened, and for the first summer in Odenton's modern history, the trail is one continuous ribbon from Odenton Road down through Bowie to Glenn Dale. The change is easy to underrate on a map. In practice, it has quietly rewired how a resident spends a Saturday.
This post is about that rewiring. Odenton's summer is no longer a set of errands stitched together by MD 175 and MD 3. It's a route.
The Anne Arundel section of the trail spans 5.7 miles between downtown Odenton and the Patuxent River, passing through the suburban backyards of Odenton and Piney Orchard. From Strawberry Lake Way south, it threads the woods along the Two Rivers community. Cross the new bridge and the Prince George's side continues 7.4 miles through Bowie to State Route 450 in Glenn Dale.
That's a roughly 13-mile one-way corridor with, by one rider's count from opening season, over 1,000 feet of elevation gain across the full length. It isn't flat, but it's a paved rail-trail grade, not a road ride. The practical consequence: a Saturday morning out of the Piney Orchard trailhead now reaches Glenn Dale Splash Park by late morning, or Bowie for lunch, without a car. For anyone who has lived here more than a few years, that mileage was theoretical until last spring.
A second detail worth knowing if you haven't been down there recently: the Patuxent Road parking area is now the natural staging point for riders heading either direction. Odenton's trail life used to organize itself around the Waugh Chapel and Strawberry Lake Way access points because those were the ends of a dead-end system. The bridge shifts the center of gravity south.
The market is the other fixed point on the summer calendar, and it works because it's small.
The Piney Orchard Farmers' Market runs Wednesdays 2 to 6 p.m., May 22 through October 30, at the Piney Orchard Community & Visitors Center parking lot at 2400 Stream Valley Drive off Route 170. It's managed by the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation, which keeps the vendor mix disciplined. You'll see Harris Orchards for stone fruit and cider, Knopp Farms out of Anne Arundel County for produce, and a rotating handful of bakers and soap makers.
Here is where the trail thesis reasserts itself. The market sits roughly a half-mile off the WB&A trail at Strawberry Lake Way. If you're already on a bike, the market is a mid-ride stop, not a separate errand. Ride south from Odenton Road, cut into Piney Orchard on the sidepath, load a pannier, ride out. Residents who have started doing this in 2026 report it feels less like shopping and more like the market being an ambient part of the afternoon.
Odenton's summer live music doesn't happen in Odenton proper. It happens a few minutes south at Waugh Chapel Towne Centre, technically Gambrills, and the July lineup is unusually strong this year.
The current run of the Waugh Chapel Towne Centre Concert Series, as compiled in the Bowie-Crofton-Odenton summer concert guide, hits these Tuesdays:
Concerts are free and outdoors at Waugh Chapel Towne Centre, 1417 S. Main Chapel Way in Gambrills. Bring a chair. The series is a family-friendly evening, and it pairs cleanly with dinner in the same complex, which matters because it means you don't lose an hour to another car trip in the middle of a weekday evening.
For September planners, the same series has an Urgent Foreigner tribute on September 4 to bookend the season.
Two food anchors deserve calling out because they solve specific problems.
The first is The Hideaway, at 1439 Odenton Road, one block from the MARC Odenton Station according to their OpenTable listing. It's a family-owned barbecue spot with local craft beer and a bourbon and rye list, and it stays open late Friday and Saturday. The reason it matters for a trail summer: it sits at the north end of the WB&A corridor. Ride the Anne Arundel section end-to-end, come out at Odenton Road, and dinner is a block away. No car, no reset.
The second is Crooked Crab Brewing Company, which functions as the informal after-ride hall for the south end. It's a working brewery that also runs a brick-oven pizza program with reasonable prices, extensive beer selection, and a shared, industrial-feeling space with vaulted ceilings and multiple bars. Groups fit. Bikes park easily. It gets loud on a Friday.
The rest of the map fills in around those two. Pho 5Up on the west side of town handles the "I don't want to cook" Tuesday. Expressway Pit Beef is the Saturday-afternoon carry-out that doesn't take reservations. Bruster's is the walk-up ice cream stop after the market, and the reason to know about it is the dairy-free and sorbet menu, which is unusually deep for a suburban ice cream stand. If someone in the group can't do dairy, this is the answer.
Here is what has changed. Before 2025, a summer Saturday in Odenton was three separate car trips: kids to a park, groceries at the market or Wegmans in Waugh Chapel, dinner somewhere on 175. The trail existed, but it was a recreational cul-de-sac.
The bridge, plus the Wednesday market, plus the Tuesday concert series, plus the two trail-adjacent food anchors, make a genuine loop possible. Wednesday afternoon: ride the trail spur to the market, load produce, ride home. Tuesday evening: dinner at Waugh Chapel, walk to the concert. Saturday morning: ride south to the bridge, cross into Bowie, ride back, eat at Crooked Crab. None of those individual moves is new. What is new is that they connect without a car in between.
That's the shift worth noticing this summer. Odenton has always been described as a commuter town anchored by the MARC station, Fort Meade, and a widening set of Two Rivers-scale subdivisions. The county describes the completed WB&A Trail as a link to an interstate route of national significance, part of the East Coast Greenway. The national framing matters less than the local one. For a Wednesday in July, the trail is the reason your errand takes an hour instead of forty minutes, and the reason the hour feels like a summer evening instead of a trip.
The county's own plan calls for the WB&A to eventually connect to the South Shore Trail in Odenton and other shared-use routes in the Odenton Town Center area. That work is still ahead. For now, the piece that matters is the bridge, because the bridge is the piece that changes what your weekend looks like.
If you're weighing a move within the Odenton corridor and want to understand which streets sit within a comfortable walk or ride of the WB&A trailheads, the Piney Orchard amenities, or the MARC station, we'd be glad to walk the ground with you. Reach out to Christine Joyce and the Severna Park Home Team to schedule a personal neighborhood tour.
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