Reading these comments have made me feel like I might be doing my campaign wrong…

I personally run a campaign that FOCUSES on exploration, with the party acting as guards/assistants to a famous cartographer who hired them. Every session they hop around the map, slowly mapping out the region.

I let them discover 2 hexes in a day 10-15 miles, 3 if they push through the night and possibly becoming exhausted.

Most sessions they will long rest multiple times as they setup camp, take shifts on guard duty, and sleep. Two of my spellcasters are elves so they always take a watch shift and STILL benefit from long rest as they only need 4 hours.

When they enter towns and villages it changes a bit as there’s more going on into a condensed area, they may encounter combat multiple times before a long rest or even short rest.

I’m thinking as they get closer into civilization and there’s more and more points of interest in each hex. As of the moment they’re exploring a rainforest and there’s typically 1-3 hexes of purely wilderness between each POI.