Internet Infrastructure

What happens every time you send an e-mail? Lets say you have a friend in California you want to send here new pictures of your family. You prepare your e-mail and press the send button, off it goes, but to where? You would think that as fast as it is to get an e-mail from one person to another that it would go strait from your computer to your friend's computer, but to do that you would have to have a direct connection between the two computers. What happens is your computer sends it to another computer or a router which decides the fastest route for the data to pass, it will also check its network to see if the e-mail address matches any on that network, then sends it on to another then on to another until it reaches your friends inbox, this sounds like an arduous process but we know it only takes a few seconds on a busy day.