Who are Chris+Suze?

We are a nomadic couple, pet sitting and travelling around the UK and beyond with our converted campervan. We love hiking, quirky places, and making furry friends! We’re here to share tips and tales from our adventures, and inspire you to start exploring too!

We met in 2011, in our hometown in Kent, and have been together ever since! We’ve always been interested in doing things differently, whether it’s staying in unusual places like yurts and school buses, going on multi-day hikes and climbing mountains, or leaving our jobs and building our own business from the ground up. We love taking on new adventures together and our life now is the amalgamation of all the things we’re passionate about – spending time with animals, exploring the UK, going on road trips abroad and being together every day.

Chris and Suze Go Walkies started on Instagram, as we needed a place to share daily candid snaps for our friends and family to follow our travels! We chose the name Go Walkies to encapsulate our lifestyle of travelling, pet care, hiking, and dog walking. Since then it’s developed into a way for us to connect with other travellers and pet sitters, and share our experiences and tips through our photos and blog posts.

Our pet sitting business

As we travelled up and down the UK for pet sitting gigs, we shared our adventures on our social media and blog. People began to find our website and invite us to house sit for them, so we made a dedicated website to allow people to find us and book us for pet sitting jobs. This was the start of our business! As Chris studied and worked as a web developer before we began pet sitting, he was able to design and build our website while Suze took care of writing the copy. Our business quickly grew as we had years of repeat clients already eager to book us as their regular sitters – by this time we knew how to do our job well, asking relevant questions, making sure we had all the information we’d need, and seamlessly fitting ourselves into a home owner’s routine. Word of mouth recommendations fuelled our success, and we are grateful to now have regular clients who book us to house sit for them multiple times throughout the year. We love to come back to care for pets we have bonded with, in routines we’re familiar with, but we do love to make new furry friends too! Our availability for the year gets almost entirely filled by mid January, so we have to make sure we book time off for ourselves so that we can take a break too!

About Van Life

For the first few years of our nomadic lifestyle, it was our dream to balance pet sitting with van life. We envisaged it being the perfect combination – the luxuries of house living while at pet sits, with the freedom to travel anywhere we wanted in a campervan. In late 2020 we rented a high top VW Transporter called Homer from Quirky Campers, spending a week in the Lake District and Scotland to test out van life, splitting our time between campsites and wild camping. We had such a fantastic trip that in 2021 we rented a Peugeot Boxer from Quirky Campers, taking Floyd for a mini trip around Norfolk to try out another style of van, testing out Brit Stops as a way to find park ups each night. Really though, our hearts had been won by Homer and in early 2022 we found our dream van – our very own high top VW Transporter!

After spending years living in different home environments via house sitting, we designed our van’s layout knowing how we spend our days, and the kind of space we value in a home. For example, we prioritised fitting a large fridge in the kitchen unit as we enjoy cooking from scratch! For us, having a smaller campervan was vital as it would be our vehicle while pet sitting too – we didn’t want to arrive at house sits with a giant motorhome to park on home owners’ driveways, or navigate narrow country lanes during our more rural sits!

We hired a van converter to bring the campervan design to a basic standard, then we worked on the finishing touches ourselves to make our camper feel like home. As any self-built van owner will know, the work is never done! We’re always tinkering in our camper, redecorating and adding new elements as our needs change. We know this isn’t our forever van – in a future where we house sit less frequently to spend more time on our own adventures, we’ll need a bigger van! But our little Transporter is the perfect get around van while we’re still balancing UK house sitting and road trips abroad.