As a new DM, my players are finally at a point where their adventurers are going to take them to places more than a couple of days away.

how do other people like to handle something akin to a week or even a month of travel?  I feel like jusy putting them in location is too simple but also rolling encounters for ever day would be too time consuming.

thanks for any input

Make the party take middle stops before the final destination. In those stops, you can eventually run some short side quests.

I like to ask my players what they're doing during this time of travel.  Have them set up a watch schedule and determined who is scouting ahead?  Ask them how they're going to handle food and lodging during the travel and whether or not they plan on stopping for inclement weather or if they plan on pushing on.  Are any of them taking the time to learn new skills/abilities/maintain equipment/forage on the path/brew potions?  Are they looking to stop trade caravans for information or wares?  These are all questions that you can ask the players so that they fill in the gaps in their minds for that month-long travel.  

Of course random encounters are fun - But they're also more enjoyable with a little embellishment.  Time of day/NPCs around/Farms or villages nearby etc are all things to take into account when a 'random' encounter pops up.  

The more information that the players give you for their travel, the more you can tailor the experience for them.  

I forgot to add:

Travelling is an optimal roleplay scenario as well, and you as the DM can orchestrate it.  

Take into account where they're coming from and what prompted them to travel.  Make a camp night 'as good a time as any' to discuss the past adventure or the quest that players have coming up.  "Bob, sitting around the campfire as the others prepare for watch, you can't stop thinking about what Tommy said about the quest before you left The Waiting Wench.  You think this is as good a time as any to ask the other members of the party about Princess Katnis and what you should all do when you reach the tower."  

Sometimes groups just need a nudge to start dialog about their quest.  If players start talking about it out of character, tell them to stop... to mention it and strategist in character instead.  

Just like filcat said; add some extra stuff along the way. Even if it's minor, it gives a sense of length to a journey. Ask the players if there's anything they're doing during the trip. Maybe one night they come across a trader who is going from one town to another, and he offers them something. Maybe there's a certain celestial phenomenon that a magic or lore-wise character might want to document over a few nights. Little things that they can make a few tests on, and allow you to stay away from combat. Things that don't offer a lot of adventuring treasure, but instead story-treasure that drives their characters.

If you want some inspiration, I'd advise to give a look to Storm King's Thunder. In that adventure, there is a lot of travel but a lot if mini quests as well. Vampire in tavern, family heirloom to find...cool stuff.

The easy way to do this is to make a lesser number of surprise encounters each night. As mentioned, ask in advance what the watch schedule/marching order is so that you can handle these surprise situations without asking the party to set up camp....unless of course you want to ask them to set up camp every single night. If its a week of travel you can roll maybe three or four rolls and see if there is a surprise encounter. The PCs should run into something, as the world is suppose to be dangerous. Since they are going to be traveling for so long and have their spells and such renewed each day, I would make this random encounter a bit harder than normal, unless of course it is going to lead to a serious of encounters for the ngiht/day. For week travels, once such an encounter happens, I would fake roll to see if any more encounters occur, but mention nothing else happens.

If they are traveling for a month or longer, I think there should be stops in between. Realistically a month worth of traveling should not occur during one game session, as the world is big and dangerous, and the PCs should run into other things. (an exception if they have other means of travel). Plus this will make other traveling means feel special.

Thanks for the feed back so far.

I basically just dont want the travel encounters to feel like filler.  Im trying to create memorable events for the characters to go through or atleast create events that players will find interesting enough to want to make memorable on their own.  I feel this is difficult to do with just a random mob encounter.

do you all have a list of npcs or events you have pre-created for such a situation or do you usually just make it up on the fly?

Along with Yarium, I'd say that story-treasure is a premium. Campfires might be good places for players to flesh out and share their characters' backstory et al. You could ask (ahead of time) for each player to come up with some interesting detail from the character's history. Maybe even suggest that they come up with things that the other characters will find troubling?

Even more, story impact hinges on tension. Tension pivots on knowing something bad might happen. So invent ways to hint at how bad the struggle at the end of the journey. Side quests are great, and even better if they foreground some troubling detail about the main story line. Instead of just a random battle, the encounters become a prelude.

As a player more then GM I can say few things are as tedious as slowly decimating the badger population (this literally became a joke in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil as the GM insisted on rolling on the random encounter table EVERY single time.  We couldn't figure out how Hommlet had any critters left when we were done.

5 years of that style of play in college and grad school and our group pretty much specialized in watch rotation, alarm spells, hanging food, laying traps, portable holes, and rope tricks.  Getting to the point where we never had to worry about it again was an achievement itself!  Every player had a ring of sustenance and the Wizard has Rope Trick memorized with a rod of Extend Spell.  That said it then made the game very gamie... as the basic challenges of survival were no longer a "thing".

Things that I've found are memorable, is giving the player an option of the random encounters.

ie: you could have a side quest with a magic suit of fae chainmail in a forest.  The party wouldn't know about it (being from elsewhere), but they meet a travelling merchant around the time to set up camp.  He could tell them the story of the knight who fell in battle against the fae and it's said his gear still resides in the forest as a sentinel.  Then if they want to take the time they can investigate the forest, find clue, face the Animated Armor drive off the spirit gone mad giving him final rest and gain a suit of mithirial chainmail.

or they find a wounded richman man, he tells them a group of bandits are nearby and how he was attacked.  They can choose to heal him.  Now the party can either decide to escort him back to town or maybe to hunting for the bandits.  If they go hunting for the bandits they might be less bandits and more Robin Hood... if the party defeats them the town might be less "happy" about the local "heroes", but the sheriff and lord will be.  If the PCs resolve it peacefully, maybe they will offer to train Robin Hood (taking some of their time) before they leave off.

One of the things I still remember to this day was back when we were low level characters travelling across a plain.  We had a pack mule with the majority of our rations.  He had to leave the mule before sneaking into the bandit camp and we tied her to whatever was at hand as best we could.  After we defeated the bandit leader and snuck out before the alarm had sounded only to find out mule GONE and the drag marks of the thing we tied her too....   We tracked the mule, until the party gave up and tried to head back to what we thought was town.  We barely survived the journey before arriving in town close to starvation.   We never did find mulie.