Up the road five miles, at a mini-mart that didn't exist when she and her husband built their home in the rural town of Harwood, there's a big sale on.
And Joyce Gillespie knows all about it.
"[It's] milk — just $2.99 a gallon," says Gillespie, 52, as she straps on a helmet and hops on the conveyance that has gotten her pretty much wherever she has needed to go since 1979.
Even on a day when the temperature will crack 100 degrees, a 10-mile round trip is nothing for Gillespie, a self-described shy farm girl best known along the roads of southern Anne Arundel County as "the Bike Lady."
"She's a private person, so I don't think she realizes how popular she is, how many people know her from her bike riding," says neighbor Deana Tice, owner of Enticement Stables. "Say the name 'Miss Joyce,' and people look at you funny. Say, 'the lady on the bike,' and they say, 'Ah, I know her!'"
Gillespie organizes her life so she can pedal everywhere — to work when she has a job (usually 10 miles or more each way), to Annapolis for errands (12 miles), to see her dad in Catonsville (37). She has logged more than 220,000 miles in the past three decades and can't recall the last time she drove a car.
Discussing why, she sounds as down to earth as the hay barn on her family's farm.
"Cars are dirty and noisy," she says. "If just half the people in the United States rode bicycles, and I think they could, just think how much better things would be."
She gives her brakes a final test squeeze.
"Ready?" she asks. "I'll take a safe route. Stay behind me."
And during a break in the traffic on Solomons Island Road (otherwise known as Route 2), she wheels out, finds a space on the shoulder and starts to pedal.
Building
Gillespie didn't set out to be a nonconformist, let alone an environmental activist of some kind. Like an unplanned ramble in the countryside, things just unfolded.
The eldest daughter of a North Carolinian who lived near Baltimore, she always had a soft spot for nature's creations. During the 1960s, while the other kids were sporting Beatles T-shirts, she was carrying notebooks with stickers that read "Save the Timberwolf." She recycled and composted before such things were popular.
At 13, she got her first horse, groomed it faithfully and rode with her sisters in the Patapsco Valley.
"I've always wanted to work with nature, not against it," she says. "If I'd been born a [Native American] 200 years ago, I wouldn't have minded it at all."
She enrolled at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the late 1970s, set on studying wildlife and someday moving to Alaska. But life takes many turns. She met a pre-med student from Edgewater who didn't merely seem smart; he knew just about everything it might take to live self-sufficiently in 20th-century America: plumbing, wiring, car repair, even beekeeping.
"You fall in love, your plans change," she says.
Joyce and John Gillespie married, pooled their savings and spent $35,000 on five rural acres about 15 miles south of Annapolis. Within three years, they'd built a house on the place, doing everything themselves but pour the foundation.
She never moved to Alaska or saved an endangered species, but Gillespie found a recipe for living at the edge of the grid. Over the next three decades, the couple raised two children, tended countless animals, grew the fruits and vegetables that were served on their dinner table and thrived on the stillness of their own Shangri-La.
Now, a half-dozen subdivisions snake through Harwood, but their place is paid off and has grown more than tenfold in value.
"I can't imagine doing things any other way," Gillespie says.
Three speeds
Things do change in life, she hollers over her shoulder while pedaling past Dick and Jane's Farm, a Harwood produce stand, and waves at the proprietors.
"Hey, Sandy and Mike," she shouts, and they wave back, calling her name. A summer's day is beginning.
John Gillespie never went to medical school (he didn't have the money), but like any good craftsman, he made do with what he had. He partnered with an uncle who had a flooring business, learning to lay carpet and vinyl. He asked Joyce to join him. And over the years, as newcomers flocked to the mainly rural area, the Gillespies often did the flooring of their patios and kitchens.
"We put the vinyl in that one," she says now and then while passing a newer-looking home.
Gillespie — a woman who rarely watches TV and doesn't know how to use a computer — had an instinct to pare things down. On most evenings, her husband had to drive off to set up the next day's job, and she wanted to get home early to take care of the kids. She started throwing an old Schwinn three-speed bike in the back of their pickup. At the end of each workday, she mounted up and rode home.
Pedaling alongside the local routes — Owensville-Sudley Road south of Harwood, Mount Zion Marlboro Road toward Waysons Corner, Route 256 to Galesville — she memorized the potholes and gravel patches, adapting to the traffic patterns. She rode on hot summer days, in downpours, when the snow flurried. ("I draw the line at ice," she says.) She planned her jobs, child care and visits to church (she teaches Sunday school) around her travel times.
Gillespie rode in a car "when I had to," almost never drove one, and so warmed to her unusual lifestyle that even when loved ones such as her father, Hugh Barnhardt, asked her to quit, she politely waved them off.
"They don't know their way around like I do," she says.
Gear changes
The first three miles to Edgewater are uphill, but as her muscled thighs work the pedals, Gillespie appears not to notice. "[Getting] tired isn't an issue," she says.
Easy to say for today's short trip, but she means it for just about all of her rides.
Until five years ago, she often entered "century rides" — one-day trips that cover 100 miles — and only remembers serious exhaustion on one, in 1994. Wearing jeans and sneakers, she pedaled through the Catoctin Mountains. "After that, the hills around here don't seem like much," she says.
That would include her rides to church each Sunday, visits to elderly residents who live alone and frequent junkets to her father's place in Catonsville — a two-hour ride each way that incorporates stretches of the Baltimore and Annapolis Trail.
The brief jaunt to the grocery store is a look at her neck of the woods, then and now. When she and John bought their place, Route 2 wasn't much more than a country road, so quiet she could sometimes (using care) roll through red lights without stopping.
As new bedroom communities sprang up and traffic thickened, the unwritten rules changed. Twenty years or so ago, a traffic cop stopped her for the first time, to admonish her to follow the law. (Because she had no ID, he couldn't write a ticket.) A year ago, a highway worker called her over to give her a county-issue reflector vest.
"He was worried that not everybody can see me," says Gillespie, who usually spurns gear for denim shorts and a T-shirt.
She has never had an accident, she says, in part because she has changed with the times. Ten years ago, her husband bought her the 21-speed hybrid. (She asked what it cost. "If the house catches on fire, get it out first," he replied.) She avoids riding after 3 p.m. because many drivers are reckless at rush hour, and she has seen so many accidents along Route 2, many of them fatal, that she gets off the shoulder when a motorist slows to make a left turn.
As the road descends into town, it seems a good time to coast, but Gillespie shifts into a lower gear and keeps her legs moving.
"Less likely to cramp up that way," she says.
Owning the road
When she was a child, Gillespie read a book about a naturalist who had lived in the wild for several months.
She can't remember the title or the author's name, but recalls that when he returned to civilization, vehicles struck him as so noisy that he had to return to the forest for a few days to adjust.
"I could really relate to that," she says. "I still do."
Cars and "gas-guzzling" SUV's offend her sensibilities. "I smell the pollution and see all the dead animals," she says. "I'd ban all cars if I could."
Since she can't, she settles for doing her small part.
My lifestyle "is a statement," she says. "It's just one less car on the road."
To some, her riding is an eccentricity.
Her son John, 24, is a computer programmer in Baltimore County. Her daughter Jennifer, 22, an aspiring nurse who is especially close to Gillespie, confesses mild embarrassment.
"You're not going to see me riding up and down the way she does," she says.
"I'm not sure where I failed them," Gillespie says.
She pulls into the On the Run store, out of the heat. They know her there.
"They say it's supposed to rain," the man behind the counter says.
"Forty percent chance of thunderstorms Thursday," she replies.
Even in a high-speed age, the bicycling habit seems to promote traditional values. But in Anne Arundel County, circa 2010, Gillespie still stands out. As she heads back south, milk jugs tucked into saddlebags across her fender, her pedaling is a study in quietude as the traffic roars past, some vehicles so close you feel a breeze.
A cyclist on a 10-speed whizzes by without so much as hollering "on your left."
"These guys in their Spandex and toe clips," she says. "Sometimes they think they own the road."
As she nears home, she passes Southern High School (it's the kids' alma mater), names a few of the farmers who live nearby and gives a friendly wave to a woman at the wheel of a horse trailer.
"Hi, Maria," she cries. Maria waves back.
It has taken 70 minutes to get home, and it's nearly 95 degrees out, but the Bike Lady has barely broken a sweat. Matter of fact, after she downs a glass of water, she'll be riding another 13 miles to a doctor's appointment.
It's just for a regular checkup, and Gillespie expects the usual result.
"Maybe I'm lucky or something, I don't know," she says. "I've always been on the healthy side."