Road Trip Planning with Vimbly

This post is sponsored by Vimbly.com and Sverve. However all opinions are my own.

Alan and I have been talking about taking an extended weekend trip this spring or early summer since we're not taking an extended vacation this year. We have looked at several cities within a several hour radius of us and one of the places we've been looking at is Chicago. I have family and friends that live in the area and it would be great to plan a long weekend to go up there to see them and plan some fun activities for us and the kids. 

Enter Vimbly.com

Vimbly shows open time slots for activities, classes, & date ideas by different businesses on a single page and lets users book directly. I first attempted to use the Choose Your Own Adventure option, but it would only let me select from movies, when I would much prefer to do something I can't do in my town. So, I decided to choose from the Cultural and Sightseeing category, much more to our tastes. 

Chicago is known for its museums, its architecture and the lakefront. While I have been to the area many times - we used to visit my family almost every summer, I haven't really done a whole lot in the city so I was super excited to find 190 activities in this category. 

I like how you can narrow your search by date, time, price, even neighborhood!

Here are just a few of the things I found that we would enjoy: 

• The Winter Loop Tour - a free walking tour of the Loop
• The Loop Interior Architectural Tour - a walking tour of the interiors of some of Chicago's famous landmarks
• The Roaring 20's Tour - a tour of the infamous sights associated with 1920's gangsters
• Tiffany Art Glass Landmarks Walking Tour - a walking tour designed to explore the art glass designed by Tiffany & Co. 
• Historic Chicago Bar Tour - a pub crawl with an educational twist In case Alan and I were lucky enough to get a date night.

While only available for 18 cities currently, I really, really like this site for planning purposes. You can do a quick Google search and find the top attractions in a city very quickly. Vimbly, however, puts everything in one place, including things off the beaten path that require a little more research to figure out details. For someone like me, with small children constantly demanding my attention, it's so convenient to be able to find everything I'm interested in doing, select an activity and purchase tickets all in one place.

Vimbly is hoping to establish a national presence in 2015 and I really hope they do because it would be so nice to use the site to plan other weekend trips, such as Nashville...hint hint :-)