It’s the path that maximises time, not distance. Technically the path that maximises time could look the same as the path that minimises distance, they could just sit down and wait decades until a minute before they die of natural causes and then get up and head to the end, and that’s assuming that they need to arrive alive.
Uncles or fish is irrelevant, infinite anything with mass presumably fills the entire space of the universe immediately and collapses everything into a giant singularity.