People mentally traverse psychological distance whenever they contemplate the past or the future, other places, other people, or unlikely events. As a result, these four routes away from one's immediate experience share important commonalities. After summarizing research on how and why people traverse distance, we next incorporate issues related to time perspective in considering who might prove more disposed to mental travel in the first place and what types of people might traverse distance more successfully than others. Throughout, we highlight the potential of these two psychological frameworks to inform one another, generating novel hypotheses with the potential to advance our understanding of the role of time in human thought.