One-man volunteer army

Peter Ramstine was born in New Zealand. He first came to America as a teenager, but he spent much of his young adulthood exploring the world, making his way as a chef in such exotic locales as Thailand, Fiji and, appropriately enough, the Cook Islands. Four years ago, he met a girl, moved to Virginia and got a job in Washington, D.C., feeding members of the government. After the relationship ended, he relocated to Pennsylvania, injured his arm, went through multiple surgeries and basically lived off his savings. A year of that and Ramstine began brainstorming ideas to get out of the house again. It then dawned on him to combine his three greatest passions: traveling, scootering and volunteerism. On April 1, he left Thousand Oaks on a 2007 GTS 250 Vespa, embarking on what he is calling the “Vespadition.” His goal is to visit 49 United States, stopping in at least one city in every state to help those communities in various forms, whether in a homeless shelter, a children’s hospital or in the still hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, rebuilding homes.

That is more or less Ramstine’s biography up to this point. But this story is not about Peter Ramstine. As the man himself says, “I just happen to be on the back of the scooter.” What he would like it to be about is the journey, the mission of goodwill that will take him from California to New England, across eight Canadian provinces, up to Alaska and back again. It is a remarkable distance to travel, of course, especially on a vehicle that leaves the passenger open to the elements and is significantly less safe than, say, a car. Again, that is not what Ramstine would prefer people focus on. This isn’t meant to be a feat of endurance. All that matters to him are the deeds he plans to perform along the way. If he wants to get anything out of it personally, it is the knowledge that he has influenced others to perform their own good deeds as well.

“If I can do this ride, get all 30,000-plus miles under my belt and volunteer in every town,” Ramstine says, “this trip is a failure if people are not inspired to do something.”

Of course, while he prefers to downplay it, the fact bears emphasis: That is a hell of a lot of miles to go on a scooter. On his Web site, Ramstine has the entire odyssey mapped out, literally to the last turn, but he has no idea how long he is going to be on the road. With the stopovers for volunteer work — his itinerary beyond New Orleans is not fully set — he could be out for more than a year. And that’s not even taking into account the physical pitfalls of such a magnanimous outing: the inevitable repairs, the inclement weather (it will likely be winter by the time he reaches the East Coast), the fatigue. He is traveling light: one pair of jeans; two shirts; a week’s worth of underwear and socks; flip-flops; a video camera; a laptop; a sleeping bag. He plans to sleep most nights outside in a tent. Other than his savings and a few hundred dollars in donations, his only source of income will be the articles he has agreed to write for PC World. It would be easy for Ramstine to inflate the arduousness of the trip into a metaphor for the human suffering he is helping to alleviate, or to portray himself as some sort of hyper-adventurous outdoorsman, but he is interested neither — although he doesn’t want anyone to think this is just an excuse for him to take a couple months off, either.

“This is not about a vacation,” he says. “Lord knows there are easier ways to go on vacation.”  

If the ride is really not, as Ramstine claims, about “the guy on the back of the scooter,” it might, then, be about the people who made it possible for him to get on the scooter in the first place. Although Ramstine is riding alone, several individuals and companies have offered to assist him. And no one’s assistance may have been more valuable than David Meyer’s. He is the owner of Thousand Oaks Vespa, the dealership where Ramstine began his outing and where it will eventually end.

The combination of altruism and scootering is not an unfamiliar concept for the business: A year ago, it gave a bike to a Santa Barbara teenager in the final throes of a battle with leukemia. When he learned of the Vespadition through a customer who had read about it online, Meyer got in contact with Ramstine and offered him a brand new Vespa for the trip. In return, Ramstine agreed to switch his starting and ending point from New York to Thousand Oaks. The two never met prior to the April 1 sendoff.    

“What he’s doing is extraordinary, in the spirit of what his motive is, to literally pass on peace, kindness and volunteerism,” Meyer says. “How many people left on the planet want to spend four to six months doing this?”

Add “on a Vespa” to the end of that last sentence and the number gets even smaller. Ramstine did not choose a scooter as his mode of transportation to make things more difficult for himself (if that were the case, he would have stuck with his original plan: walking the route), but it is as much a statement as his scheduled stints in hospitals and soup kitchens. For one, it is a cleaner ride. According to Piaggio, the Italian company that has produced Vespas for more than 60 years, their brand generates 80 percent less carbon dioxide emissions than an average car. And, in an era of perpetually ballooning gas prices and increasing calls for America to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, the Vespa’s fuel economy is greater than even the vaunted Toyota Prius, receiving upward of 72 miles per gallon.

Beyond the environmental and economic advantages, however, is the symbolic implication of taking a scooter across the country. Ramstine’s mission, as its core, is rooted in human connection, and that is something that cannot be conveyed as clearly confined to the inside of a car.

“It’s more inviting, if nothing else,” Ramstine says. “It causes people to go, ‘What the hell are you riding?’ And when you tell them how far you’ve been riding, that you started in L.A. when you’re in Maine, they say, ‘You rode all the way here?’ ”

“I don’t think the message is clear at all to go and do this in a car,” says Meyer, whose company also sold automobiles before converting to all two-wheelers. He says the GTS 250 he is loaning Ramstine will be retired to the rafters of Thousand Oaks Vespa once he returns, with a plaque honoring the ride. “When I was in the auto industry for 20 years, I would never meet someone like Peter attempting to do what he wants to do. If someone had come to me and wanted a car to do this, I would have told him to go to Avis.”

Second, perhaps, to Meyer in importance to helping launch Vespadition is Meghan Scott, president of Zeitgeist Agency, the graphic design and marketing company that created Vespadition.com. The site was the nucleus of Ramstine’s preparation for the trip, and will continue to serve as the closest thing he’ll have to a home base for the immediate future. Like Meyer, Scott did not know Ramstine personally when she discovered him, through an ad he placed online; she has since been drawn in by the humanitarianism, to the point where this no longer feels like just another job for her.

“In the rush of this digitally charged age of ours, below that frantic layer there are people looking to connect, who want to improve themselves, and Peter is taking that message to the streets,” she says. “He makes it real for people.”

Ramstine has received sponsorship from a dozen other companies donating everything from a riding suit and a helmet to saddle bags and a GPS device (in terms of surviving the ride, the most significant gift for Ramstine is the seat pad, courtesy of Butt Buffer). In most cases, Ramstine has not gone after the sponsors; the sponsors found him. For a lot of them, the attraction isn’t Ramstine, it’s the Vespadition (Scott still hasn’t met him in person; they plan on meeting up when he reaches Washington, D.C., where Zeitgeist is based). And that’s exactly how the guy on the scooter prefers it to be.

“I’ve been torn about publicizing myself over the ride,” Ramstine says. “When you see an event, and you find out about the person doing it, it becomes about that person, and the mission gets lost … I don’t want to be the focus of the ride. I’d like to be an afterthought or sidenote of the ride. If I do the trip and people don’t know my name but know Vespadition and what it’s about, I’m completely happy.” 

Track the Vespadition online at www.vespadition.com.