Moon or interplanetary travel is solidly achievable with 2-3 stages if it's built right. Like if you have a 3 stage design, 1st stage needs to do the heavy lifting to get you up out of most of the atmosphere, then 2nd stage you use for a mostly tangential burn to establish a circular Kerbin orbit, then 3rd stage would be for your transfer burn to whatever body you're trying to visit.
Make the core stages of the rocket all liquid fueled so you can modulate thrust, and use solid boosters to help the heavy lifting down in the atmosphere. Then you can blow off the boosters when they flame out which lightens you up and makes getting into circular orbit easier.
Using the maneuver tool in orbital map mode helps plan your burns & predict resultant orbits a lot. The KSP wiki site also has a lot of good info, recommend visiting.
http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Main_Page
And yeah I hauled a rover up to the moon too.
