We've violated our own keep-the-gas-tank-topped rule on endless 93, figuring that fuel near Vegas will cost less than in the few remote towns we pass. By the time we turn onto the interstate 20 miles from Vegas, the needle is solidly on empty and the trip computer has stopped calculating our range. We coast into a truck stop on fumes.

Las Vegas to Kettleman City, California, via Death Valley
Funny thing is, all the cheap motels have free Wi-Fi while the expensive ones charge for it. Here at the high-zoot Bellagio, in Vegas, they don't even have Wi-Fi; instead, they want to sell us an Ethernet cable for $14 and then charge $13 a day for Internet access. As we leave on Highway 160 heading northwest, it takes half an hour to get beyond the suburban new construction, but soon we're climbing into a wildness of small mountains and tall bluffs, then down into a broad, sandy valley where the road lies like a stretched tape measure, visible for probably 20 miles. The clarity of the Nevada air makes distances seem deceptively shorter than they are, which must have been hell for the forty-niners trudging all day toward endlessly distant mountains. Nice to have a car that can cruise at an easy 120.

Outside Pahrump, a dusty desert community of casinos and brothels—you can easily paw through bare-breasted photos of "the ladies" online and even make reservations—my co-pilot spots an unmarked shortcut to Death Valley that saves us a good 40 miles. Our gas tank is more than three-quarters full, but can you blame me now for considering the words "Death Valley" and backtracking a mile to top off?

The Nissan's GPS nav system has a 3-D mode that not only tracks the two-dimensional lat/long position but altitude as well, and we use it to gauge our descent into Death Valley. It is dead-nuts accurate, varying by three feet from the roadside altitude markers—which happens to be about the distance above the road of the GPS antenna on the car's roof. We never see minus 282, Death Valley's deepest below-sea-level point, but at the road's lowest swoop are figuratively peering up at Pacific surf 249 feet above us.

Kettleman City to Big Sur
We're on the way to a fabled junction: California 41 to Cholame is taking us to the intersection with 46 where in 1955, Donald Turnupseed pulled out and crashed head-on into James Dean, who was coming out of the late- afternoon sun in a small, tinfoil-light Porsche 550 Spyder race car. Dean, 24, died (Turnupseed didn't), and a legend was born.

The obvious route to the coast is via Highway 46, just south of Paso Robles, and it's the way to go if you want to visit Hearst Castle at San Simeon. But a far more spectacular road is little G18, 20 miles up the 101 Freeway from Paso. (As far as I know, Southern Californians are the only people in the country who add the article to numbered routes—"the Five," "the One-Oh-One," "the Four-Oh-Five" . . .).