I have two time travel fantasies...

1. Provided I can't be eaten by the local wildlife, I want to arrive with the First Americans in the interior of the New World before the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. Think of it. A New World devoid of hominins. The world abounds with strange and wondrous wildlife. Dire wolves. Mammoths. Sabre-toothed cats. Short-faced bears. American lions. Giant sloths weighing two tons chilling with American camels, horses, giant tortoises, giant beavers, armadillos, and tapirs. Provided I didn't become lunch within five minutes, that would be the best trip ever.

2. A grand tour of the New World roughly a century before contact. I want to see the managed forests and farms of the Eastern Woodlands, the canals and bustling markets in Tenochtitlan, and runners carrying messages throughout Tawantinsuyu. I want to see the diversity of coastal California nations, Mississippian Mound complexes at the height of their influence, Mesa Verde during the Great Pueblo period, and the grand trade fairs at The Dalles during the height of the salmon runs. That would be awesome.

I have a few, in reverse chronological order:

• Betar at the ending days of Bar-Kokhba's revolt, assuming time travel makes me immune from being stabbed by a Roman Legionary. Were the rebels regretful at what they'd unleashed? Confident in a miraculous victory? This rebellion was the last major Jewish rebellion against Rome, and it was moderately successful. I'm curious to know what their thoughts were.
• The Sanhedrin at Yavne, soon after the Temple's destruction. It'd be cool to see how Rabbinic Judaism was in the late 1st century, particularly the sort of conversations about how to pick up the pieces after the Temple was destroyed.
• The Second Temple on Yom Kippur, post-Herodian renovation. After Herod's renovation the Temple was at its most big and fancy, with a big courtyard and an artificial plateau made for it. Yom Kippur, while not the day of the biggest temple ritual, was definitely the most elaborate. Without going into the details of Jewish sacrificial law, the high priest would be washing, incensing, and sacrifice-offering, culminating in offering incense inside the Holy-of-Holies. And by this time, it was the only time in ritual that God's actual name would be spoken. This is a set of rituals discussed at length in the Jewish Yom Kippur liturgy, and it always seemed pretty cool.

since we're time travelers, can we assume use of future tech, like shielding or invisibility / advanced disguises?

I'd kind of like to investigate several periods of history, but as black dude, it wouldn't really end well for me.

for instance, I'd like to attend a formal ball held by the Queen Victoria Elizabeth to see what it would really be like to be there. you can read about all the odd foods and argue about how smelly / clean things would or wouldn't be.

Can I be a music nerd today instead of a linguistics geek? I'd love to attend the debut of Handel's Messiah, even if half the recitativo secco parts zonk me out. Or hear Paganini play. Lurk around that church where Bach was an organist and witness contemporary reactions to his shenanigans (honestly he seems like a bit of a smartass, or maybe just a regular ass. It would be entertaining.).

And again on a personal note, I'd like to meet my great uncle, who died during the second world war, and my cousin who died of cystic fibrosis when I was just a baby. In many ways, I grew up in the shadow of these two people, knowing all about them but never knowing them, so it would be nice to have some memories to put to the pictures.

Let me go straight for the obvious and say I'd love to sit in on the first "real" showing of Lumière films, at the Grand Café in Paris, December 28th 1895. We know what the programme was and there are contemporary accounts of the audience reaction, but still: One has to ask oneself what really happened in that room, and how people (Especially the truly naive general-public audience members) reacted to those images when they were shown.

My first answer is a pretty simple one, and perhaps shows how provincial my tastes are: I would travel to the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna in May of 1824 to attend the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I would like to see it loosed upon the world for the very first time. I would like to see and feel and shiver to the energy in that room -- the largest premiere audience he had ever amassed in one place, the largest orchestra and chorus he had ever commanded on stage, his first appearance before a crowd in over a decade. I would like to see the sweat and blushing and exultation in the faces of Caroline Unger and Henriette Sontag, transfigured in beauty by the excellence of their task. I would like to see the audience in its raptures, in tears, in complete approbation, throwing everything they had on their persons and in their pockets in the air and at the stage to show the deafened legend that they were his, for now and forever. I would like to hear those notes roar upon the earth in public for the first time, and leave nothing standing in their wake. It was the beginning and the ending of a single moment, never anticipated, never repeated. It was the perfect event.

Failing that, I would like to go back and (safely -- or perhaps not entirely safely) view the great crescendo of artillery on the night before the opening of the Somme Offensive in 1916. It had already been the most titanic artillery barrage in the history of the world, but that night... to see miles of landscape swept up in fire and thunder and chaos, to hear the endless sound and feel the endless percussions, to see the concentrated Hell of an entire nation's wrath upon a slender sliver of landscape... that would be a special thing.

I'd want to go back and do research on PIE. I want to narrow down precisely the region they originated from, and how speakers of PIE came to be where they were. What enabled them to spread out so far and why were they so successful in their spreading all the way to the edge of the European continent and so far east up to the foothills of SE Asia? What was their culture like?

In the same vein, I want to know what happened to those that IE languages displaced. What of the Basques and where they came from? How much influence did the displaced have on their local IE successor languages?

Basically, I want to fill in the gaps of pre-Indo-European Europe.

Probably what I'd most like to see is Chang'an around 700 AD, during the height of Xuanzong's reign. Not only just for the grandeur of a Tang city right after order was restored from one of the more tumultuous times in the Dynasty, but also to get a sense of just how metropolitan and complex things were. There are records of guard stations and patrols on the city streets, the various quarters and districts, etc. And of course the markets, where you can really get a sense of the length of the empire: goods everywhere from Korea to Persia and beyond (as well as the people). Even just getting to see the centralized imperial government offices or the temples of everything from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism to Coptic Christianity would be quite the sight.

I have a couple!

• Like others have mentioned here, if travelling in time also prevented being stabbed, maimed, and otherwise brutally murdered/kill by fauna and local population... I would LOVE to visit Mongolia in mid-1st century, namely when Attila was wreaking havoc across Asia and Europe. Most, if not all (correct me if I'm wrong!), of their history is hear-say and written by their victims and conquered nations since they didn't have a written language. I would love to truly see their campaigns, how they interacted with conquered peoples, and how they managed to conquer and terrorize a large portion of the known world.

• The Library of Alexandria. Such a treasure that was lost, and I would love to lose myself in there and just wander. I know I won't be able to read what was written, but I think it would be simply amazing!

• Since I'm currently in a Greek lit class, I would also love to visit the Acropolis of Athens in it's hey day, maybe visit and watch a play by Euripides or Aristophanes.

This might seem like a small/petty thing given that I could go anywhere in history, but I'd really like to know what happened/wtf Ted Kennedy was thinking in the Chappaquiddick incident. Oh, and I'd love to know whether DB Cooper survived his parachute jump, and who he was. And I'd love to be a fly on the wall when Carter was at Camp David planning his "crisis of confidence" speech. Or in the Nixon white house throughout Watergate.

Plus there's a lot of so-called "mysteries" that historians are pretty sure they have figured out (read: almost positive) that I would love to witness just to be like "case closed!" So I wouldn't mind following Lee Harvey Oswald around for just long enough to put the final nail in the coffin of all the nutbar theories about JFK's assassination. Or confirm that Mallory and Irving didn't quite make it to the top of everest. Being present at the Apollo 11 Landing (does our time machine come with a spacesuit?) would also be pretty awesome.

As others have said, provided some sort of technology that allowed for communication, and kept the local fauna from obliterating me...

Bronze Age North America. I would like to truly experience/know what life was like among the Native Americans. Not the romanticized politically correct, or the equally distasteful "Noble Savage" propaganda that passes for the histories of these people. We have been so effective in their eradication, that I fear we will never know them to the degree that we do other cultures of the period.

Plus, I think actually experiencing one of those buffalo herds would be beyond astonishing.

^Edit: ^A ^word.

The Campaign of Alexander The Great. Why? Because to keep an army marching away for nearly a decade...it must have been something. Sad that so many people died though. Can you imagine the reaction of his army to seeing an army of war elephants?

Rome in it's most peaceful time after Christ. Just taking a stroll, seeing this culture in it's strength. Trying the best food, going for a steambath, seeing a peaceful game, the soldiers. A great trip and scenic.

The Seige of Troy. You get to see Aias the Greater being all "I might be 10 feet or taller and gigantic" fighting alongside Odysseus and Achilles fighting a river. No way this wouldnt be cool plus much more.

The Pelopenisian Wars: The "first World War" Naval warfare too. Be sure to check out Alciabades and Socrates on a day or two of your trip!

The Time Of The Son Of God, and his time walking among us. Imagine being able to walk physically with Christ, the wonder and glory of God.

So i am going to make an assumption on top of the first assumption that time travel can happen in that I also have a universal communication device.

In this regard I would love to go back and see socrates lecture and see how much what his students painted him as would be true and how much he is different from the portrayal. I would also love to just be able to learn for a day or two under him.

The second place would be to go to rome at the height of its power to see how the everyday man really was like and what their opinions on life the universe and everything. Plus I would have to visit some bathhouses and just immerse myself in the everyday culture.

It's so hard to choose just one time and place to go. There are so many things I'm really interested in seeing first hand. But after much deliberation, I'll just go with one choice, and its kind of an unusual one:

March 26, 1915, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

At the Denman Arena the Vancouver Millionaires of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association are hosting the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey Association in the third and final game of a series for the Stanley Cup, the championship of hockey in Canada. Vancouver had won the first two games of the series with a combined score of 14-5; as it was decided by total goals, it seemed likely the Stanley Cup would be going west of Winnipeg for the first time in its 22-year history.

Led by the famed Fred "Cyclone" Taylor and featuring a starting lineup that was comprised entirely of future members of the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Millionaires easily handled their eastern opponents, winning the match by a lopsided 12-3 score. It gave legitimacy to the PCHA, founded by brothers' Frank and Lester Patrick in 1912 after they moved out west and created a league to compete with the NHA.

Though Vancouver would play for the Stanley Cup a further five times, it was the only time they would win the Cup. While the Victoria Cougars of the same league had played in the 1914 Final, and again in 1925 and 1926 (winning in 1925, the last non-NHL team to do so), they lacked the star power of Vancouver: Taylor was the first superstar of hockey, and at one point was the highest paid athlete in the world, and as mentioned his teammates were no slouches either.

The game would have looked nothing like hockey does today: there was no forward passing; no lines on the ice; players played the entire game without rest; protective equipment like helmets were not used by anyone, even goaltenders; goaltenders didn't fall to the ice to stop shots, but rather stayed on their feet; it was also somehow more violent, with a lot more stick-work used on opponents; and in the PCHA seven players were used at a time, not six like today. But to watch someone of the calibre like Taylor not just play against, but dominate a skilled team like Ottawa, would have been a great treat to watch. To see Vancouver win its only Stanley Cup championship, a feat that is still yet to be replicated by its NHL club, would have been an added bonus. There's a lot of memorable hockey games that would make for great viewing, but I've always been fascinated by the career of Cyclone Taylor, and to watch him win the championship with Vancouver has got to be my top choice.

1. The Trinity Atomic Bomb Test - The most powerful weapon created by mankind. As horrible as nuclear weapons are, they seem to be truly a sight to behold. Granted, we'd have to find a safe location and bring special equipment for eye/radiation protection.

2. The Toba Event - Supposedly this blast took the human population down to 15k~17k people. I'd love to be standing in Northern Australia or Thailand to see it initially... but we'd have to boogie quick.

3. My current town in New Jersey 1000 years ago - Just to see what was here before my overpriced condo and civilization were built on it.

For my personal interests: I've always wanted to visit Old Warsaw before it was bombed flat in the Second World War, especially in the late 1920s. Interwar Warsaw was such a fascinating and contradictory place, and it was a very unusual mix of Polish, Ukrainian, German, and Yiddish cultural influences that I don't think has existed anywhere before or since, on the eve of a conflict that transformed all of those cultures in deeply fundamental ways. During the Second Polish Republic, Warsaw had very innovative art-house cinema, but only a few of the films (or artists!) from that era survived the war fully intact.

For commercial opportunities: Lincoln getting shot by John Wilkes Boothe. Charge admission, bring paying customers.

I'd like to see the Temple of the Feathered Serpent being destroyed at Teotihuacan.