By Executive Editor, Steve Titherington.
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It's over. 39 days. 4000 miles. Hundreds of people interviewed and thousands of words written, spoken, and broadcast.
The BBC Bus completed its marathon journey from coast to coast covering the US election race from a simple premise: keep moving and keep talking to people and find out what America really wants from this election.
'Talking America' is the biggest and most ambitious multi-media and multi-lingual project achieved so far; with 12 language services for the BBC World Service represented, plus two on-board bloggers and the aim of turning everything we did into radio, on-line and television.
As Steve Evans, a veteran BBC journalist and one of the bus presenters said, "One of the things journalists tend to do is to run to the story and that's absolutely right… of course it is."
"What this bus really does is it gets those things that news journalism often fails to get, we sweep up behind and get that greater colour, that texture, that real feel of real people."
Hurt and confused
There were many times when we were asked whether we would change the route as the financial melt-down hit but even though the theme changed, the route stayed more or less as planned.
A total of 12 language service reporters spent time on the bus
It was Middle America we came to talk to and Middle America was hurt and confused at events happening on Wall Street and in Washington and wanted to voice their anger.
For some of the language service reporters this was their first close look at America and it proved something of a revelation for them and their listeners.
Informed and passionate debate was not what Duong Hoang, of the Vietnamese Section had been prepared for: "I was told that Americans did not know about the world. That was not the case."
Few of our interview requests were refused and few questions went unanswered.
Embedded democracy
We were at a gun-club outside Phoenix, Arizona and our first presenter Ros Atkins – tired of broadcasting from car parks, bars and the like – said, let's just be in someone's home.
We asked around and found ourselves invited into the house of Susan Bitter-Smith – a Republican and a friend of John McCain - and so broadcast live from her home into the early hours relaying the thoughts and opinions of her friends both Republican and Democrat.
Susan had just failed to be nominated as the local Republican candidate for state elections and stacked up in the front yard were now the discarded posters for her election bid.
It was miles away from the big corporate-style election campaigns the world glimpses on television, and suggested just how much democracy is embedded in US society.
