I kind of like writing to fit a map as well, not that I do a lot of it but, shrug. If some place ends up being too far away and would result in long boring trips then I just fill that with "it rained for the next few days and they traveled in grouchy silence". Filler like that is invaluable when writing to a map. Mapping to a story is much more precise and takes way longer to map properly in order to get distances correct and results in lots of editing the map.