Wow yeah, that's one heck of a path. Judging by the latency, I suspect that is accurate. I'm in Austin at the moment and I have basically the exact same connectivity and latency to that .42 host as you have, about 50 ms, +/- 5 ms. I'm going ATX > DAL > LA > PHX > DAL. Terrible path…
One of our developers is about 40 miles outside of Chicago, to get to the Chicago HE.net endpoint, his traffic goes to NYC and back. At home I'm about 300 miles away from Chicago using the same one, and my latency is about the same if not a little better than his. Not always the best routing in the world on those, unfortunately...