re: Reality can be a bitch
The Milky Way Galaxy is only 100,000 light years across, not 300,000. I just saved us 200,000 extra light years.
One of our nearest galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, is only 170,000 light years away. More time and space saved for traveling.
If you could travel at 99% lightspeed, time would slow down so that if you took a trip to the Andromeda Galaxy and back, you would only age 56 years (put yourself in suspended animation and age even less). Of course Earth will have aged almost 6 million years, but I bet you will find a lot of neat things in Andromeda to keep you occupied for ages.