The idea for Driving with Dogs came in 2005 when we (Lezli and David) sat on the M40 in a traffic jam for over an hour in the blazing sunshine.

Jem, our Border Collie, was just a few months old at the time and he was panting and pacing in the back of the car, clearly desperate to cool down and have a leg stretch. We could see fields with footpaths from the motorway, but there was no way to get at them.

Later, we searched bookshops for a handy reference book with lots of short walks near motorways so that we didn't get caught out again. To our huge surprise, we couldn't find anything suitable - or that was up-to-date enough to rely on.

So we decided to make a small set of walk places and pubs with good food for our regular trips from the Midlands to London on the M40, and to friends in Manchester and Carlisle. We used these six or seven pubs and walks to meet up with friends along the way, and the friends wanted photocopies so they could use them too. The number of walks grew to about a dozen, and we put them online to share with the friends of the friends ...

By 2007 we'd begun to notice country parks and brilliant dog-friendly pubs all over the place, and decided to have a go at sharing them on a website. And in 2008 we were completely taken over by the project, using every opportunity to explore different parts of the country - and fortunately Richard joined the team with the technical skills to build a website that did what we wanted.

There were some amazing e-mails from complete strangers, telling us how much they enjoyed the site. And the e-mails from disabled people with assistance dogs were incredibly humbling, motivating us to carry on walking and do something really useful for people who travel with dogs in the car.

By the beginning of 2009, we'd walked well over 1,000 miles and written walks for just about every motorway junction that it's possible to leave a motorway at. That's over 400 walks!

Motorway Walks - a handy book with about 200 walks up and down the motorway network - came out in September 2009. And it's great that we can keep the book information up-to-date on the website, especially since pubs are changing landlords or closing down so quickly. The book's now available online from amazon.co.uk, Waterstones and Tesco.

It's been an amazing journey so far, and we've still got our walking boots on ...