Bringing major horsepower to Pony Express country, Stephan Wilkinson rides shotgun in the Nissan GT-R from the Great Basin to Big Sur

We're climbing out of mythic Death Valley, California, the lowest, driest, hottest place in the United States. The road is serpentine, scary, vertiginous, with guardrail-less drop-offs on the passenger side of the car and vast views back into the broad valley.

"You think Mom would like this road?" my daughter, Brook, asks, laughing, while cranking the wheel. She's recalling her mother's fingernail dents in the passenger-door handgrip whenever Brook and I get crazy in a car. This trip is a brief ticket to ride for my daughter and me, footloose and together.

The power of travel can be two car guys with one high-performance automobile and nobody to tell them to slow down. Or, in this case, a power-trip paradise for a father and daughter who have shared their fascination with fast cars since she was 12, old enough to sneak out and begin driving the empty back roads around our rural home.

Our ride this time is the 2009 Nissan GT-R 2+2 supercoupe. It has so much power that the reticent Japanese won't even admit the true total. (After all, it wasn't long ago that there was an informal agreement that no Japanese manufacturer would advertise more than 280 horsepower in a production car.) Nissan claims the horsepower is 480, but truth be known, it's probably an excessively American 520 horses.

Being too wizened to handle such grunt, I've requisitioned my race car–loving daughter to deal with the serious driving chores. And a lucky thing, too: She gets the only speeding ticket of the trip—96 in a 70-mile-per-hour zone. "Good thing they didn't tag me 10 minutes ago, when I was doing 150," she said. (Hold your cards and letters, outraged readers: 150 miles per hour on an empty 20-mile-long Nevada desert straightaway is, for a good high-­performance driver in a capable car, about as dangerous as riding a garbage-can lid down a bunny slope.)

Reno to Ely, Nevada
"It'll be a few minutes until your car is ready," the Nissan guy says. I glance out the window and see two Japanese engineers with laptops plugged into the poor dear. Not good.

Fifteen minutes later, I check again and one of the engineers is reading a thick technical manual. Worse.

Ten minutes after that, he is on his cell phone to Japan. We're in trouble. The GT-R has more electronics than your local Best Buy, but the techs eventually diddle diodes and massage microcircuits thoroughly enough. We head out of Reno, a city filled with a VFW-get-together's worth of canes, walkers, and mobility scooters; if Las Vegas is a mecca for middle-aged conventioneers, Reno is the magnet for varicose-nosed geezers.

Diverting from our route to Ely, U.S. 50 takes us to Fort Churchill State Park, built in 1860 to help protect California-bound settlers as well as, briefly, the Pony Express. Despite its renown, the Pony Express existed for only a year and a half, from April 1860 to October 1861, during which 120 jockey-size riders, weight limited to 125 pounds, galloped 650,000 miles, changing horses every 10, and supposedly lost only one mail shipment. They had great PR, though.