As mentioned prior, I’m viewing travel as movement in a much larger dungeon area–the great outdoors–and expect the procedures to provide much the same interest as moving about in a typical dungeon environment. When it comes to stocking the wilderness, the idea of an “empty room” is problematic.
Stopping to describe a scene during travel that amounts to “you don’t sense anything unusual about this place” is rather…boring. And silly. Why bother describing a specific site in which nothing interesting is happening? Background description from travel should be constant, so an “empty” space would be nothing more than additional background description (“a stream crosses the trail”). It wouldn’t even register as a place of any interest.
I think each “room” in a wilderness dungeon should offer something of interest. That’s why I don’t have checks for encounters, I have checks for events. An event isn’t automatically an encounter, though encounters are a type of event. As with dungeon stocking, an event could be a monster, a treasure, a monster and a treasure, or even a trap (that could then lead to an encounter). An empty room result, though, should offer something of interest.
That could be a natural wonder of some sort, say, a waterfall or a flock of birds blacking out the sky briefly. Perhaps a herd of herbivores crossing the trail that takes an hour to clear the way. Or a construction of some kind, say an obelisk or other standing stone, statues of vaguely humanoid figures, a well in the midst of nowhere. Something that can provide a distraction that could lead the PCs to dawdle and lose time examining it, which in turn increases chances of encounters or leads them astray from the planned route.
Make the “empty room” in the wilderness something that lead the PCs into investing time and attention that would best be spent in pursuing their original goals. Entice them to expend resources, even if it’s just some wasted time. It’ll help with the sense of the setting being a real place, too.