On the road with Richard Quest
By Peter Williams
CNN Cameraman/Editor
(CNN) -- You have to really love your job to be on the road with Richard when he is on a Quest.
For the last six weeks I have recorded sights and sounds from the four corners of America. My name is Peter Williams, and I am Richard's cameraman/editor on this fantastic journey.
During this process we have burned our way through three producers -- and even as I write we have Paul, a fly-in relief editor who is being frogmarched through his paces.
A trip like this with such steady output of television and a dizzying array of multitasks surely takes its toll. I am tired.
But it is a stimulated tired. During my days in London my wife would always know when I had been working with Questy. She would say that that I had a manic wide-eyed weariness that could only come from trying to appease a creative brain firing 50 percent faster than the human norm. Keeping up is quite a ride.
Now this American Quest has been the marathon of short sprints.
It is what I have been training for in my decade of working for CNN. I have attempted to be the electronic eyes, albeit mostly bloodshot ones. Days, places, hotels and talking heads blur into the ping of airport announcements.
We have narrowly missed hurricanes, watched producers fall down muddy banks, and rolled around in tears on an American football field after Richard declared: "These footballs don't bounce" ... and then slammed one into the ground that bounced squarely into his crown jewels!
I have been bitten by a poisonous spider in the desert filming Richard stirring cake mix while partaking in a rarely recorded Native Indian coming-of-age ceremony. I slept in the bed Lee Remick once did in the famous El Rancho hotel in Gallup, New Mexico. I gained 10 pounds around my waist.
We flew from Los Angeles to Singapore on the world's second-longest flight -- only to recheck back in at the airport and take the world's longest flight from Singapore to New York. And film a feature program during the flight (for the show "Business Traveller," in case you are wondering what that has to do with America.) We resumed the American trail from Ohio.
All in all I would not have missed this experience for the world. I felt at the top of my game, with the right person to take me there. We made good television and recorded a piece of American history that will never be repeated.
I know I have only scratched the surface of the American elephant's back, but I am sure I have witnessed more diversity than many Americans will see of their own country in a lifetime.
I do not know who will win the election. But I have seen the needs, achievements and disappointments of a huge and great nation of states. And I have met a lot of good Americans along the way.
