Year in review: Top weird travel stories of 2010

When cheesed-off flight attendant Steven Slater cursed out passengers over the PA system, swiped a couple of beers off the drink cart (nice touch!) and slid down an illegally deployed emergency chute into the nation's consciousness - well, we figured we had the weirdest travel story of the year pretty well locked up.

But this was 2010, and we were wrong. This, after all, was the year a group of severed human heads missed their flight to Dallas/Fort Worth. This was the year a passenger learned the hard way not to complain about airline food. And this was the year some people decided to stay home and send their teddy bears on vacation.

Considering all that went on in 2010, can you blame them?

Here's a look at some of the highlights, lowlights and midlights of travel from the past year.

But everybody gets a fresh SkyMall catalog: In May, Qantas Airways acknowledged that it washes and reuses plastic knives and forks from in-flight meals as many as 30 times, Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

We'll take our chances on the bus, thank you: In February, the Daily Telegraph reported, the city of Portsmouth, England, began issuing taxicab license applications in audio, large print and Braille versions.

A fourth religion makes claim to the Holy Land: In November, the Israel Ministry of Tourism announced that "travelers from around the world" are flocking to the town of Ramle to visit the previously obscure grave site of a British soldier killed during a 1939 skirmish in Palestine. Why? The deceased soldier's name was Harry Potter.

The request for an extra-long bed should have been a tip-off: Holiday Inn used to trumpet the slogan "No surprises," and by that we suppose it meant you could confidently step out into the hallway without encountering a slithering python. But that's what happened in the chain's Mason City, Iowa, hotel in May when the snake's owner decided to let it out for a little unsupervised exercise, according to Gadling.com. The hotel fined the owner $65 and reminded him that its pet-friendly policy was limited to cats and dogs.