Expedia has a nice long list of sale fares for travel out Sunday or Monday with a return by Thursday. So if you haven’t made any plans and are feeling sort of footloose and fancy-free, you could skip from Washington DC to NYC for $96 roundtrip. Madison, WI folks can hop on over to Chicago for $80, and folks in Reno could escape to San Francisco for $90. Tickets are limited, so you’d be advised to get your bum in gear if you want to score one of these low fare deals.

Fourth of July Fare Sale on Expedia

Might not want to look so hard for a bargain in New York, says Newsday’s Online Hotel Bookings May Land You Bed (Bugs) and Breakfast. Apparently, some shady apartment landlords are advertising their crappy buildings as bargain hotels - even on reputable travel sites.

I feel for anyone who ends up in the situations described in the story. But I’m also a strong believer in checking hotel review sites before booking (cough, cough) and not believing bargains that look too good to be true without further sleuthing.

An educated traveler is a happier traveler.

All new at TravelPost.com: Real, original hotel pix taken by users to go along with TravelPosters’ hotel reviews.

There’s just something reassuring about seeing a hotel room in a picture taken by a regular Joe. It adds another layer of information that’s nice to have when you’re checking out hotels.

Check out all 18 real photos for San Francisco’s Hotel Monaco to see what the hotel looks like during the day, at night, inside and out.

Scroll through all six real photos for the Westin New York Times Square to find out what the fitness room really looks like.

And some pix (pardon the blurry one!) I added myself for the Doubletree Hotel Albuquerque.

To upload your own photos, just search for the hotel on TravelPost.com and click Upload Photos. It’s easy. You can do it.

Listen up pyro freaks. The Fourth of July is comin’ around the mountain, and - if you’re like me - you won’t want to see the holiday weekend pass without at least a sparkler or two. With all the safety precautions these days - you know, so people don’t, like, die and stuff - you can’t just waltz into a store and buy up a truckload of Roman Candles, like folks used to do back in Virginia when I was growing up. Nope. Now you’re lucky if you can score some of those snake things.

To find out the rules for your state, use the National Council on Fireworks Safety’s handy page on State Fireworks Laws. Just click your state on the map to find out what you can and can’t buy.

The uptight states that allow NO fireworks whatsoever:

Massachusetts

New Jersey

New York

Rhode Island

Delaware

A few funny rules:

- In Ohio, you can only buy fireworks if you plan to take them out of the state within 48-72 hours. Obviously they’ve got it in for Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

- In Texas, you can set off anything short of a small rocket. The law doesn’t say anything about BIG rockets, so have a good time if you’re in the Lonestar State this weekend.

- If you want to plant some mines, play with torches or “colored fire,” go to Arkansas.

- South Dakota really puts its foot down. Fireworks containing dynamite and nitroglycerin are strictly prohibited. Which really sucks, because that’s where I was planning to take all of my sticks of dynamite this weekend.

- In Tennessee, don’t worry about taking time out of your busy day to buy fireworks. You can just send your 10-year-old. Hey, might as well give little Johnny the car while you’re at it.

Now that you’re armed with fireworks information for your state, have a safe and happy ramp up to the Fourth!

By September, Marriott will have lobby computers in all of its U.S. and Canada hotels (incl. Renaissance) exclusively for guests to use for checking in to flights and printing boarding passes. So now, even if you don’t travel with a laptop, you’ll be able to check-in before arriving at the airport and bypass that step. This is obviously only going to matter to travelers without baggage to check. But hey - from the massive numbers of people trying to stuff their crap in the overhead bins these days - that’s a lot of people. The computers are already in many of Marriott’s properties. The company will continue to add more throughout the summer.

Marriott and Renaissance Hotels Offer Guests Easy Airline Check-In

Here’s an Insider Tip for all yall non-smokers in da house: FreshStay.com lists smoke-free US and international hotels, inns and bed and breakfasts. If a hotel is completely smoke-free, it gets three pineapples (don’t ask, I don’t know the significance). Hotels that are mostly smoke-free and guarantee smoke-free rooms during the reservation process get two pineapples. Good site to bookmark for easy reference. It’s a little rudimentary, but it looks like the folks behind it are working on improving it.

FreshStay.com

Looking for a budget vacation destination? Well don’t choose Moscow.

Moscow Ousts Tokyo As World’s Costliest City

Cool shot of reed boats from TravelPoster Spikey’s adventures in Copacabana, Bolivia. As always, click the pic 4 more….

Hotel Indigo (boutique properties in Chicago, Atlanta) has launched a free podcast feature available to anyone through its web site. The summer podcast, and they are supposed to change with each season, features songs by a random assortment of well known names (Sonny Rollins, Little Richard) and other lesser knowns (Madi Simmons, Rondo Brothers and Audrey Ryan). Kinda cool in the age of no free music downloads.

Hotel Indigo Podcasts

Waterbabies and sunbunnies can be very particular about their resort pool environments. For example, are towels placed neatly on each cushy chaise lounge each morning, or do you have to schelp your own? Are there private cabanas so you can escape the plebian riff-raff? And what about cocktails, huh?

Las Vegas Hotel Pools is designed to bring you information on all of the above, plus ratings of individual hotel pools and user-submitted photographs. It’s not super-packed with content yet, but definitely worth a peak if you’re heading to Vegas this summer. Trust me, if you’re visiting a place with an average summer high of 104 degrees, you’re going to want to hang out by the pool.