CAPE MAY, N.J. (CNN/Money) - This weekend trip had been set up for months. I would be sharing a house in a southern New Jersey shore town with five of my brothers and four sisters. Two nights. No spouses, no children. Just us "kids."

An opportunity to spend a few days with a 2005 Mustang GT just happened to fall on the dates of this long-planned trip out of town.

Perfect. The car meshed with the theme for this journey: This was a revisiting. Going back to something old, bringing it to the present and making it better.

As the youngest in my large family, I was still in single digits during the late 1960s. I was far too young to have ever driven one of the original muscle-bound Mustangs that inspired the '05.

But somehow, with its three-spoked steering wheel and deep set, big-numbered gauges, the car seemed instantly familiar.

It started out Friday morning as I pulled the "Torch Red" preproduction Mustang GT out of a Manhattan garage.

A young man walking up the sidewalk stopped as the car nosed out.

"You turning left?" he asked.

I nodded and gestured for him to go ahead. I'd wait.

2005 Mustang GT Coupe Premium • Base price: $25,705 • Price as tested: $29,665 • Engine: 4.6 liter V-8, 300 horsepower • Included options: Shaker 1000 sound system with 6-CD changer, interior red accent package, side airbags. "Premium" edition includes leather interior.

"No, no," he said. "I want to watch."

The whole trip was like that.

I picked up my brother, Carlos, at his suburban home and started south. All along the way drivers pulled up close to get a look. A few passengers leaned out of car windows with cameras.

A last-generation Mustang filled with amped up high school boys -- one of them hanging halfway out the side window, swinging his fist in the air and howling -- hauled up alongside. Their driver gunned his engine, challenging us to a race.

Sorry, not with my big brother in the car.

Money magazine • Review: 2005 Ford Mustang GT

The Mustang's back seats are, essentially, a parcel shelf with 3-point seat belts. The car's front seats, however, provided a comfortable ride for us on the roughly 150-mile trip down the Garden State Parkway. (I'm a little under six feet and Carlos is a couple of inches taller, and better looking.)

Sitting in the driver's seat of a 300-horsepower muscle car gives you a new perspective on all those stinkin' toll booths along the Parkway. Stomping on the gas pedal after tossing change into the big buckets provided most of the real driving excitement on the trip.

My brother -- who fumbled and cursed as he tried to pull exact change from the awkwardly designed coin holder -- didn't share the visceral thrill I experienced with every "Pay toll ahead" sign.

While we're on coin holders and the like, the car could do with better storage amenities. Most cars these days have more places to put small stuff than most people have small stuff to put. Not this car. There's just a square-ish covered box between the seats and a narrow gutter in front of the radio.

And the coin holder? It's inside that box.

The old-style dashboard gauges, with their large, squared off numbers, were fun to look at but a bit hard to read. I became keenly aware of that problem as we passed through a stretch of highway that seemed to be a hunting ground for state troopers.

One nice thing about the new gauges, though, is that they are always lit. In the daytime, they glow slightly when cast into darkness by a tunnel or an overpass.

At night, when the headlights are on, the instrument cluster in our Mustang GT shined with a deep blue light. Seen from the inside, the car changed from a well-bred muscle car to an alien spacecraft with a nasty streak.

Supposedly, the instrument lighting color is customizable, with 125 different possibilities. I never could figure out how to change it, though, even after going through the owner's manual.

While the car was parked, there were questions and compliments from passersby. A woman who lived near the Mustang's parking spot in Cape May exclaimed at the number of people who stopped to admire the car, talk about it and take pictures.

On Sunday morning, I found a note tucked under the windshield wiper.

"This is soo awesome!!!" the note said. "If at ALL possible, I would LOVE to hear it run!"

The writer left her home and mobile phone numbers and signed her name, "Melissa."

Sorry I missed you Melissa, 'cause the car sounds good. The Mustang's throaty rumble at idle hits just the right note.

That sound is no accident, either. The perfect Mustang sound was modelled on computers before the first of the new V-8 engines was even built, according to Ford. The rumble was further honed in a laboratory environment using prototype cars.

After I got home, a few night-time runs on sparsely populated back roads gave the car a chance to show its real athleticism. As I already knew, it accelerated like a cattle-branded race horse. But it also had an agile, balanced feel around corners, something Mustangs have not traditionally been known for. (For a full performance review, click here.)

I had spent a few hours driving the 5-speed stick shift version on highways around New York earlier in the week. For the weekend, I had been given the 5-speed automatic. The automatic transmission does little to hinder the car's launch speed. In a few spots of heavy traffic, in fact, I had to learn to go easy on the gas to avoid hurling the Mustang into the trunk of the car ahead.

In a few months, 2005 Ford Mustangs won't be getting the kind of attention this one did. That's because, by then, the cars will be selling like soft-serve cones at the seashore in summertime.

But don't worry, notes on the windshield are only part of the fun.