Oh, it's definitely rowt and rowter, always. "We'll take that route to get there" is "rowt". Pronouncing that "root" sounds vaguely odd, sort of funny and almost pretentious to me (I guess I have this image of the "posh British accent" from some movie or something). I don't know how I learned to pronounce it that way, but I did. Answering where I was from was tricky, though. My first 13 years of life were spent in the Midwest, and the rest after that in the West, but I've been going to college in the Midwest for the last 6 years . . . maybe I should've said middle instead of west? (And my parents come from the east, so if you mix their influence in, that muddles things more.)
