Sounds like a sub-type of question substitution, where you're taking the question "what's the best route to take?" and substituting "what route is simplest?" or maybe substituting the unnatural problem of planning a car trip with more common problem of planning the short-term motion of an object like your hand, or a ball.
Alternately, if you feel more driven by the feeling that it's bad to have to retrace your steps, that would be something more like a "purposefulness drive" (I'm calling it this because of an experiment by Ariely), where it's not so much that you are getting the wrong answer first, it's that you're feeling bad about getting the right answer because part of the trip feels "purposeless." It wouldn't actually be purposeless, the feeling would just come from (again) a sort of question substitution where your brain ignores the big picture when deciding how to feel.
Picture a circular road on a map. Let's say that my office is at twelve o'clock, my home is at five o'clock, and the post office is at three o'clock.
Now, suppose I have to leave work, pick up a document at home, and take it to the post office to mail it. I know it's faster to walk clockwise home, passing the post office, and then return to it with the letter. But my gut preference is to go counterclockwise, either because of an aversion to retracing my steps, or because that route just ... feels "cleaner" or more efficient somehow, or ... I can't articulate it any better than that.
Does anyone else share this intuition? Is it a manifestation of one or more known/studied effects?