Taking 395 all the way from Victorville to The Dalles would effectively avoid any major mountain passes. But it has the same problem as I-15, in that even though there's no particularly nasty passes, there's lots of high elevation and it can be snowy pretty much anywhere. I think you'd probably be best off just sticking with I-5 because even though there are some mountain passes, most of that route is pretty much at sea level. The I-5 passes also see a lot more maintenance and snow removal than some of the lonelier roads further inland.

It can, but is usually a once-a-year or less occurrence. The CHP sometimes even closes it, although that's probably more to do with the aptitude of So Cal drivers in the snow than with the severity of the weather. It'll be on the news if there's snow up there-- there'll be reporters from the LA stations wearing arctic-grade parkas against the 30 degree weather.

But Cajon is a pretty nasty pass even in the summer-- if I were towing something, I'd probably just go up through Yucca Valley and avoid the San Bernadinos altogether unless you have to go into LA anyways.

For a '73, I'd be more worried about the ethanol than the oil, but it should be fine. If you had a truck with a catalytic converter, I'd say to add a couple gallons every tank, but that'd just be playing it safe. Some old timers used to add a quart of oil or transmission fluid to a tank of gas as a top end lubricant (which probably didn't do anything, but at least didn't cause any problems with old pre-smog vehicles). People also used to dispose of used motor oil by pouring it into the gas tank a quart at a time back in the pre-smog days.

The usual arrangement with junkyards is that they give you the value of the tow if they have to haul it off. In other words, you get nothing but they don't charge you either. If you can get it there yourself, you might get the scrap metal value of the car, which is probably going to be in the very low three figures.

The optimum way to get value out of a dead car is to part it out. But obviously that depends on having free time and understanding neighbors/landlord. For this car, you might have some luck just listing the whole thing under the "auto parts" section of craigslist.

I'd add a few things to Sounds's very good response.

Firstly, lifting a vehicle improves the angle of approach. If you're approaching an obstacle or even just a steep hill, if the vehicle is too low to the ground, the front bumper will hit it before the front tires do and so you won't be able to go any further. The effect is usually even worse if you're trying to back over something.

The other thing is suspension travel. Lifting the vehicle allows the wheels to move further up and down, which means you can move over uneven terrain without the tires rubbing on the wheel wells.

One other possibility with the lifted vehicles you're seeing with normal tires is that the owner has a separate set of wheels for off-roading. High performance off-road tires are expensive, wear quickly and perform poorly on-road and so often owners will keep a separate set of wheels for just tooling around town (or driving hundreds of miles to get to Moab or wherever they like to off-road), and won't throw on the expensive mudders until they're actually ready to use them.

But I will agree that SPS is probably the largest factor involved in lifted vehicles you see in Seattle.

This Blog purports to have information regarding visitor access: http://www.nps.gov/olym/naturescience/dam-removal-blog.htm

The only thing it really mentions is that the road has been repaired to maintain access to the valley. If I recall, there's a pretty good view right off the highway and then you can also get closer on that road (which is apparently still open). I doubt you can tour the site itself without pulling some strings, but you can probably go out and get a pretty good look at what they're doing from afar.

There's also webcams here, if you don't feel like making the drive: http://www.video-monitoring.com/construction/olympic/js.htm

You can scan slides with a normal old flatbed scanner but it is definitely tedious and the quality is not going to be great if you blow up the slides too much because that starts to push the resolution/DPI limits of a cheap scanner. It's okay if you just want to put some of them on the web, but it's not really the way to go if you're trying to save them for posterity (and get them out of your garage!).

There's nothing really remarkable about scanning a slide other than that they're really small. Just scan the slides (after cleaning them as best you can) and then use a program like Photoshop or GIMP to crop and enlarge them and do any color-correction necessary. You can scan more than one at a time, although you'll want to scan at the highest resolution your scanner will do, so a whole sheet of them might slow your computer to a crawl. The first few will probably take a long while to figure out (and you'll want to experiment with how much you can enlarge them and still have them look good), but once you figure it out you can probably do one or two a minute.

Why not invite them out here? If there's no religious significance, it doesn't even need to necessarily be exactly during Christmas. Like Fnarf says, you need to assert your adulthood and deserve an equal vote in planning family gatherings. And your reasons for not wanting to go out there are perfectly legitimate. Making an effort to arrange some sort of alternative gathering might at least help preserve feelings, even if it comes to nothing.

Though here's one secret if you've really got a spread out family: Las Vegas. You can fly there for relatively cheap from anywhere in the country and nobody wants to gamble around the holidays (or hold a convention) so lodging is usually super-cheap that time of year. (You don't actually have to stay in Vegas-- I think Vegas itself is mostly gross, but there are some beautiful areas near by). I think meeting on "neutral ground" can diffuse some of the tension of the parents/grownup children dynamic, and you can tailor the lodging situation to give every sub-family the level of privacy they want.

It's still not entirely clear what the expected lifespan of the batteries are. There are still plenty of 1st-gen Priuses running around with their original batteries 200,000+ miles later (and some taxis with far, far more). It is seeming more and more like the batteries can last the life of the vehicle. Not that they never fail, but there seems to be little rhyme or reason to when exactly they fail, so it's not necessarily true that battery death is imminent or even inevitable on an older Prius. Of course, it might turn out that the magic battery death age is 15 years or something down the road.

I think the way to look at it is this. A normal car has two high-dollar components that can potentially fail as the car gets older: the engine and the transmission. The Prius's battery means it has three (well, there's also the electric motor, but I think those failing is almost unheard of). So in my book, a Prius of this age would be 50% riskier than a normal used car. It wouldn't be my first choice if economy and reliability are your main priorities, but those are some of the same compromises you make with a brand new Prius.

You might be interested in this Consumer Reports article from earlier this year where they bought an '02 Prius with 200k miles on it and compared its performance to a new one they tested in 2001. There was basically no degradation of performance: http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/02/200000-mile-toyota-prius-still-performs.html