The fort—once 20-odd small buildings and barracks around a parade ground—is in ruins, with only the adobe walls of several structures still standing. It's a poignant sight now but must have been a heartening one 150 years ago: It meant that the promised California land was on the horizon.

But we're heading east to Ely, so it's back to U.S. 50, which also has great PR as "the Loneliest Road in America," a fanciful exaggeration. Still, we agree never to let the gas gauge drop below half, since 100-plus miles between Nevada gas stations is not unusual. Route 50 was once a major leg of the Lincoln Highway, the first true transcontinental route, from Times Square to San Francisco, and far more famous in its time than Route 66. Dwight Eisenhower remembered riding parts of it in convoys as a soldier and as a result championed the development of interstates.

The road in places is so long and straight that oily mirage reflections shine far ahead. It's a flat, sere, sagebrush landscape, but the horizon all around is filled with colorful mountains and odd upthrusts. It's endless but endlessly fascinating. The only sign of humanity is the graffiti: Hundreds of posterity seekers have spelled out their names in foot-high letters with black stones on the white salt flats bordering the road.

Wraithlike snow showers drag their skirts across the desert as we head toward the Shoshones—luminous mountains that seem dusted by a confectioner. I get the Nissan up to an easy 160 miles per hour—the top speed is 193—and the stability is stunning. I've never driven a car so planted and composed. There are times when we pass the occasional tractor-trailer heading west, and at enormous closing speeds—his 80-plus, our relatively cautious 100—the GT-R is so aerodynamically refined that there isn't even the usual slipstream whoomph from our crossing. Instead, the sleek coupe slips through the disturbed air unruffled.

In Austin, we pay $4.06 a gallon for premium; a big pickup across the pump island has just filled its tank with $166 worth of diesel, so I don't feel too bad.

The Nevada trooper who stops us soon thereafter is annoyed that we're using a radar detector, even though it's legal. (Radar detectors don't work, we've just demonstrated, when you're speeding alone; you need a stalking horse ahead to make the cops trigger their radar guns so your detector can catch the signal early.) He's also nasty enough to radio ahead to his cronies to see if they can catch us a second time. But we're doing a sedate 70 when we pass the next cruiser in 20 miles on the Loneliest Road in America. I hope we interrupted his lunch.

Ely to Las Vegas via Great Basin National Park
"Car's still there," Brook observes as she glances out the front door of the Hotel Nevada. We'd simply parked our exotic on the street—there were only six GT-Rs in the country at the time—but it gets little attention from Nevadans, who seem to think it's just another Japanese coupe. The only people who notice it are 14-year-olds, car wash attendants, and, we'll discover later today, every valet in Vegas. The GT-R and its predecessors, Japanese hot rods called Skyline GTs, are a staple of car-crash video games and The Fast and the Furious films, so people old enough to appreciate Porsches, Ferraris, and Aston Martins are generally unaware of these youth-icon Nissans. One of Nissan's marketing challenges will be either to find 14-year-olds who can afford GT-Rs or to make their parents aware of them.