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One mistake I made early in my writing is that I felt that everything had to be described at all times. If the bad guy was fixing a presidential election, over the course of the novel I'd continually update the polls as the bad guy's plan unfolded. Boring.
Christopher Buckley does this well in his novel Boomsday. The protagonist's actions are meant to provoke civil unrest. Buckley does not just smash in a bunch of needless scenes to illustrate this, though. Instead, he just updates us with a paragraph or two at appropriate times. The reader knows what is going on in the backdrop, and we can go on reading the novel.
You say:
the two characters who are traveling
together in this specific instance
have just met each other and should be
forging their relationship during the
travel.
There is no need to recount the entire eight-day journey across The Whatever Plains. You can write one scene wherin our heroes are tested, and how they solve or escape the situation will result in a different relationship between the two characters. Maybe they encounter a thief and one guy wants to kill the thief and the other convinces him to spare his life and let him go free. The relationship has thus changed, character 1 respects character 2's council enough to change his mind on something he was otherwise determined to do.
The best stories don't simply make this a throwaway scene. "Oh they found a thief and let him go and now the characters are cool with each other." That's a waste of time. Rather, the thief can crop up late in the story and provide something that spares the characters. Or, if tragedy is your game, the thief can partner with Bad Guy and eventually cause the colossal undoing of our heroes. The novel's moral center is thus conveyed, the reader learns some lesson, etc, etc...
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