I looked what Lub was talking about as far as MTR goes.
The nodes on the route (specifically of Cogentco) have higher ping times when they're responding to ping packets. They are perfect when packets pass through, however. Lub gave me an IP in the UK that I could ping, results were consistent at 99-101ms (note how it's the end point). Results for pinging nodes in between shot all over the place.
I don't know if points along the route normally have trouble responding to ping packets, but these certainly do.