Travel Encounters (Advice)

 Walking from place to place should have some form of excitement; I mean you're traveling from one path to another. That being mentioned; you don't have to go along with the usual encounter, you have a number of different ideas you could do to spice up the journey.

You could run across a small NPC off the side path; maybe has a kitten stuck in a tree, something small, a small moment for the group. These mini quest, small moments can sometimes be fun, and really add some enjoyment between a boring walk to spice things up, and keep the players on their toes for what small encounter they might come across. Perhaps you're not a fan of small encounters; well you have other ideas still to go with.

Ambush; maybe have an enemy encounter / ambush them; this way you're putting them in a situation where they must react, and make a choice. The tight path, from a smaller walled off area or even the fact they leaped from a bridge. Give them something small to contend with. Maybe your group already dealt with a combat encounter however! The other idea then would be more simple but engaging.

Treasures, and traps; a small moment to see if the players see if it's a treasure or a trap; a nice surprise of a reward, or a dangerous trap they stumble upon! Keep in mind too many of these traps, and treasures will bore the player, and or give them a general idea what you're going for next. This will open up the encounters to be testing your players wits about them, do they trust it? Why would a small treasure be out here? What could it mean? This can be out of place, and it's not useful to use a lot, more of a once in a blue moon situation.

Traveling merchants; it'd be cool to run across traveling merchants, that's one thing I don't see in campaigns very often, really besides traveling merchants just any other traveling NPC. Maybe have it where the player and NPC are both traveling the same direction! Have it where the player gets some info from the NPC, giving them some insight as of what's going on, some rumors floating about; etc. These situations vary but the idea of having characters already set up in your back pocket to pull out is useful, but maybe you're not a prepper kind of DM, perhaps social interactions got too much bogged down in your session okay.

Unique environments; if all else fails, and you want the players to be given a relaxing, no interaction, no better engagement kind of system then fine use a unique environment system! Have them encounter creatures, have the environment paint a picture for the player. An example being if you have a campaign of werewolves then show bloody claw prints on the ground, corpses that look as if some kind of monster tore into them, use the walking time as the environment to tell a story. Have a tombstone on a hill, just something to give your players a sense of what's going on in the given environment, to tell them info not outright but to give them context clues, and really paint a picture of what they're up against.

At the end of the day it doesn't have to be boring, any number of ideas can spice up the adventure. This gives some more depth to the in-between, and yes you know what I'm going to say, sometimes have those boring moments to have the exciting awesome moments mean so much more. Or if you're wanting to give a lot of info without giving a lot of info then use those moments with a mixture of these elements instead, as thus giving another interesting way to look at the world once more. Information like this can be vital in building upon the game overall without having to railroad the player.