Travel stories that'll make your head spin

Travel troubles en route to vacation destinations? Well, it could always be worse. As the summer travel season begins, kick back and read the horror stories in author Doug Lansky's The Titanic Awards: Celebrating the Worst of Travel, for a feel-good exercise. Here are a few:

Lost Xbox is no game. When US Airways lost the Xbox of a 21-year-old Yale student (it reportedly was stolen from his bag), the student filed a lawsuit against the company for $1 million in damages and $1,700 for the gaming console.

Me first! A supposedly intoxicated first-class passenger leaving a Delta flight from New York to Georgetown, Guyana, could not afford to wait for economy-class passengers to exit the plane and instead took a shortcut: through the plane's emergency exit and down the chute.

This missed flight was costly. A passenger who missed his flight to a friend's bachelor party in Munich decided to take a taxi there. Seventeen hours and 740 miles later, the cabdriver earned 1,950 euros (about $3,170 at the time).

Turn right — into the lake. A GPS device led a Polish man and two passengers into a lake after the driver ignored three warning signs and followed the system's directions. The three escaped the vehicle. The road ran into an area that had been closed a year earlier and flooded to make an artificial lake.

Overwrought, overboard. After arguing with a woman, a man jumped off the Carnival Sensation cruise ship while it was 30 miles out to sea off Port St. Lucie, Fla. He had a change of heart in the water and yelled for help; a passing Disney cruise ship picked him up 90 minutes later.