I have a very basic question:
Is it possible for a client to be connected wirelessly to two routers at the same time. Two routers are in the same local area network.
If not, what is stopping me? Is it the wifi card?
No, most (all I know) wlan cards only allow a single STA connection, aside from only being able to a single channel anyways.
You can roam between them but a single radio will only client mode to a single AP at any given time. One AP may have different networks SSIDs but they all share a channel.
A single host can have multiple connections, often one per physical interface, but certain media allow multiples with virtual interfaces (such as VLANs on Ethernet). The host will need its own rules for how it routes outbound packets when multiple routes are available. For most consumer devices, the routing table is locally managed and is not "controlled" by other hosts on the network.
As pointed out above, most consumer-grade wireless adapters only support a single "client" association. With very few exceptions, even "dual-band" cards only support a single client association. Multiple 802.11 client connections generally require multiple "cards" in the device.
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Yes; but you cannot achieve routing with the normally used protocols. All devices would use (and therefore, must be capable of) AdHoc connections.
I suggest OLSR for this application (depending on size), it is available for installation on OpenWrt. There's also a LuCI web GUI.
What type of client do you mean? A smartphone, a pc with wifi dongles or a router with a wireless interface?