In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely applied to sense the physical environment, especially some difficult environment due to their ad-hoc nature with self-organization and local collaboration characteristics. Meanwhile, the rapid development of intelligent vehicles makes it possible to adopt mobile devices to collect information in WSNs. Although network performance can be greatly improved by those mobile devices, it is difficult to plan a reasonable travel route for efficient data gathering. In this paper, we present a travel route planning schema with a mobile collector (TRP-MC) to find a short route that covers as many sensors as possible. In order to conserve energy, sensors prefer to utilize single hop communication for data uploading within their communication range. Sojourn points (SPs) are firstly defined for a mobile collector to gather information, and then their number is determined according to the maximal coverage rate. Next, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to search the optimal positions for those SPs with maximal coverage rate and minimal overlapped coverage rate. Finally, we schedule the shortest loop for those SPs by using ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Plenty of simulations are performed and the results show that our presented schema owns a better performance compared to Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Multi-hopWeighted Revenue (MWR) algorithm and Single-hop Data-gathering Procedure (SHDGP). © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.