Noncombat encounters on the road

[Flickerdart]

Hey guys,

My PCs will do some serious travelling in my next campaign (Sword coast) and a lot of it will be between small settlements. I do not want to reduce this on "you pass from one town to another", but I want to give them some fluff to chew on between two locations. Perhaps a caravan leader that tells them something about the region, perhaps a ruin that tells them something indirectly about the area, perhaps a carcass of a specific magical beast ... unintrusive things that make a journey a bit more fleshed out.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Medieval villages were only hours of travel from one to the next, and even important places like market towns were about 20km apart (otherwise the peasants could not bring goods to market). As the party travels they should pass a whole ton of small hamlets, the farmland belonging to those hamlets, peasants working that farmland, etc.

Ruins tend not to survive in populated areas - they are resettled or pulled apart for construction materials.