Dear Reader,
Today i learned some thing kool which unfortunately i did not know. How bad? Yea after all these years of my geek life, i never cared to know about this much. So today i managed to get much information and began searching about it. So thankfully there is a linux command which deals with this.
Its called traceroute. This command has alot of options associated with for ones choice. As usual my first action is to check its man pages. After that i wanted to checked what route does my packet takes to reach the destination. And to my surprise i learned the route to my USA servers. It was nice to see how many hops it has to stop by 
So here is the sample for ya, do play with it, you like it
$ traceroute to stackexchange.com (64.34.119.12), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 5 59.163.206.173.static.chennai.vsnl.net.in (59.163.206.173) 237.415 ms 269.427 ms 271.285 ms 7 if-0-100.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.5) 105.208 ms 198.141 ms 243.709 ms 8 if-2-2.tcore2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.2) 333.940 ms 337.023 ms 339.478 ms 9 if-6-2.tcore1.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.130.5) 342.224 ms 345.845 ms 346.605 ms 10 if-2-2.tcore2.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.131.1) 348.317 ms 11 if-2-2.tcore2.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.131.1) 363.263 ms 12 if-20-2.tcore2.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (216.6.99.13) 453.472 ms 321.450 ms 325.879 ms 13 if-15-0-0-20.mcore4.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (209.58.60.133) 322.720 ms 14 ix-5-0-1.mcore4.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (66.110.8.58) 279.575 ms * * 15 gwny01.stackoverflow.com (64.34.41.58) 294.522 ms * * 16 gwny01.stackoverflow.com (64.34.41.58) 295.224 ms 303.355 ms *
As you can see from the above traceroute command output for stackexchange.com website, i could found out that this site/server resides in USA. What is surprising for me is that my packets travels all the way to chennai -> Mumbai -> London -> Newyork. Quite a long travel you know. 
Since then, i have been playing with every web site i keep visiting to know the route. Its fun to see such a complex travel path. Wow internet is one amazing spaghetti place
You can find much more detailed information from here
Happy geeking
