I would do the normal trip routines, but certainly not worry about the Volvo's reliablilty. If you read these boards, you see only the complaints of owners with a problem , and almost never see that there are thousands of very satisfied owners of very dependable Volvo's, including '98 AWD's. If you read closely, you will see that many of the compaints condense into a handful of more frequently experienced repairs, with few of those being ones that would strand you on a trip. Even the infamous AC evaporator problem (with its up to $1500. fix) is by no means universal. In my lengthy Volvo ownershiop experience, most of the issues I have seen with people I actually know are traceable to poor maintenance or poor dealer service departments. Our '98 V70 XC AWD, for example, has 78k, and has had the infamous air pump waterlogging problem ($600 before i learned just how easy it is to do it myself, and before I learned that a lot of these can be avoided by drilling a little hole in bottom lf the pump before it seizes up). Otherwise, it has never been to as shop for anything but scheduled maintenance, and shows no signs of being untrustworthy (we did a 400 mile day trip today with a visiting freind from abroad, for instance). Not to say nothing will break, but I really don't think that the things that break will statisically be that big a deal over the long haul, and the rest of teh Volvo ownership / user ex[perience will more than offset it.
One opinion, Mike
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Mike Sullivan ('91 745 (171k), '93 965 (147k), '95 855T (60k), '98 V70XC (78k)