Every once in awhile, you find a utility that really does a nice job of handling a simple but important task. Ping Plotter, which graphically displays the network route your traffic takes from your Windows desktop to a remote site, is one such utility.
Ping Plotter is available in both a freeware version that cannot save copies of the graphs it generates, and a shareware version that allows output to be saved. You can get PingPlotter from http://www.pingplotter.com/
One caveat: Please do NOT leave PingPlotter running continually! Use it when you need to understand the route between your desktop and another site, but then hit stop.