TIME TRAVEL TUESDAY: TOP 10 EVENTS I WOULD GO BACK TO SEE IF I HAD A TIME MACHINE

The Omni from VOYAGERS!

Regular readers know that I’ve never met a time travel story I haven’t loved whether it be one of my favorite movies TIME AFTER TIME (1979) or the haunting STAR TREK episode “City On The Edge Of Forever”.  Heck, I even like lesser stuff like THE TV series VOYAGERS (1982-83) and TIME TUNNEL (1966-67).  Any TIME SQUAD fans out there????  So naturally I have often pondered where I would go if the chance to time travel came my way.

In choosing my Top 10, I took into account that I believe it wrong to go back in time with the aim of changing history.  There are always unintended consequences to every action and I, frankly, think that history largely follows its intended path no matter what we do.  Sure I could stop Booth from killing Lincoln, but who’s to say that our 16th president wouldn’t have died soon anyway due to lingering health issues.  Same for Kennedy.  So most of my picks are to simply go back and be a witness to history. 

Here are my Top 10 Events I’d like to see:

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Nuvo

#10—Indianapolis, Indiana, May 30, 1911
Attend the inaugural Indianapolis 500 Mile Race.  Watch the cars race around the original Brickyard at almost 75 mph.

#9—London, England, 1595
Attend the world premiere of Romeo and Juliet.  Get William Shakespeare’s autograph.

#8--London, England, September, 1888
Follow Jack the Ripper around Whitechapel, bonk him on the head and find out, once and for all, just who the heck he (or she) was.  I suspect it was someone we have never thought of.

#7—Ancient Judea, circa A.D. 31
Find out where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount and get a front row seat.

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Wright Bros Family Album

#6--Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, December 17, 1903
I’d find a seat on a nearby sand dune and watch the Wright Brothers give their flying machine a try.

#5—Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863
Catch Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.  And I’d arrive early to get a front row seat so I could actually hear it.  I also want to see how close Daniel Day Lewis came to capturing the real man.

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Hindenburg, 1936

#4—Frankfurt, Germany,  May 6, 1936
Take a transatlantic flight on the airship Hindenburg.  No, I would not book a ticket on the fateful 1937 trip (see reason in #1).  I have been a fan of airships my whole life.  I prefer them to our modern cramped jetliners any day.  The chance to spend three days sailing the Atlantic in luxury would be just perfect.

#3—Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963
Catch President Kennedy’s motorcade moving through Deeley Plaza while keeping my eyes firmly focused on the Grassy Knoll.  Was there a second shooter?

#2—Jerusalem, A.D. 33
Witness Jesus’s crucifixion.  Just to see how close the actual event was to all the versions we’ve read and seen down through the years.

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RMS Olympic, 1911

#1—Southampton, England, June 14, 1911

Take the maiden voyage of the Olympic.  The what???, you ask.  The Olympic was the sister ship of the Titanic.  I am an admitted Titanic fanatic.  I probably own a dozen books on the ship.  I’ve had the blueprints memorized since childhood.

Why take a ride on the Olympic instead of the Titanic?  Because I’ve seen enough time travel movies to know that if I went on the “unsinkable” Titanic, something would happen to prevent me from getting off the ship before it struck the iceberg and went to the bottom!  Better to sail on the nearly identical Olympic (which safely sailed the Atlantic from 1911 to 1934) than risk becoming the next Jack Dawson.

Those are my Top 10 Time Travel Destinations.  What are the places where YOU would go??????

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