long way around

This is about what the trip has looked like so far. Rand McNally puts it at a little more than 3,100 miles, although we took winding routes across Montana to push our mileage somewhere beyond that.
I hadn't been through Washington for more than 10 years, and had never been the driver across the state. I'd forgotten what the ride into Seattle on I-90 is like - 20 miles away from downtown, you're still in the mountains, with almost no sign of a metropolis up ahead. At about mile 17, you hit the first sign of suburbia - Big Box chains, identical dwellings marching along a subdivision - but even there, it's different. The chains' signs have to compete for viewing space with the covering of evergreen trees, and the suburban home architecture is shoehorned onto a hillside. It almost makes the sprawl easy to look at.
My decade-old impressions of downtown Seattle were only reinforced by walking around for a couple hours - not enough to get a true feel of a city, I know, but enough to know I'd like to spend a lot more time there. After five years of Midwest schooling and four years in the South, it'd sure be nice to get back to the mountains.
Four more days, give or take, and I'll have entirely new mountains to look at. The road trip has taken up most of my thought space - drive for a day, see friends or family for a day, drive for another day, see a whole new group of friends or family - and the fact the end destination is actually 6,500 miles across the Pacific hasn't had a chance to really burrow it's way into my brain.
Today, we drive to Corvallis to see my little brother at Oregon State, then perhaps to Portland before giving up our auto-mobile life for airplanes. A skip from Portland to San Francisco Friday, then a leap from San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand Sunday (but we land Tuesday).
No accommodations or other plans have been made in New Zealand, beyond the first two nights. We finally did make hostel reservations for those a few days ago.