If travel isn’t the story that you and the players at the table really want to tell, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with skipping most or all of it. I do like the suggestion that Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff puts forward: ask each player to describe a situation in which they did something cool to save the party from danger along the way.

To my mind, the big issue is that there aren’t any good tools in the system to extend consequences past 1-2 days of in-game time, without using Exhaustion that brings the journey to a complete halt. In theory, you could use Supplies as a fungible currency and source of consequences – but then one character with a decent Survival score or goodberry can wipe most of that out basically for free (at worst, some cost in travel time).

This UA was something I was already mostly doing aobvious to me when the PCs are trying to find something in the wilderness

Personally, I’ve tried to provide meaningful random encounters (not just the good-ol’ raging owlbear) plus the opportunity for the PCs to interact with each other and/or NPCs present. But I hate to admit, some of the travel time has been put to FFWD.