Originally Posted by rowan

One simple way is http://localbitcoins.com/

This marries together buyers and sellers with an escrow service.

https://localbitcoins.com/guides/security

Note that you will not get the absolute best price, but with all of the mucking around it may take to get USD into a proper exchange the price would have gone up by then anyway (ie buying it now at a 3% loss is better than buying it in a few days when the market rate has gone up by 10%...)