Looking for the best way to link to categories..

I am building a custom theme for an existing wedding blog. Some of the blogger’s posts are vendors that she is featuring. One of the new pages on her blog will be to specific vendors, sorted by location, and then within the location type of vendor. So I need to come up with the best way to create that sorting and linking.

I am thinking the best way is with sub-categories, so the categories would look something like:

Vendors
-Location 1
–Photographer
–Venue
–Caterer
-Location 2
–Photographer
–Venue
–Caterer

I am assuming at that point, I can just create links to the children and grandchildren categories? It makes sense in my head, but I haven’t tried it so I figure I would ask if that sounds good, or is there a better way? If I could just bounce this off a few people, that would be great. Ideally this wouldn’t use a plugin.