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With that out of the way, you can hardly wait to take Brett out for a spin, all the way back to the age of dinosaurs. Thankfully, temporal physics proves that there's no possibility of messing with anything in the present, no matter what you do tens of millions of years ago in the past. To put it bluntly, the "butterfly effect" is a myth—just something science-fiction writers dreamed up.

With the time-travel apparatus taking up so much space in the back of the Land Rover, you had to remove the rear seats, converting it into a two-seater. You need to be creative in cramming food and supplies into every available nook and cranny. Extra gas cans and a couple of spare tires go on the roof, together with a tank of propane in case the wood in the Cretaceous is too damp for a cook fire. Since there'll be no stopping at a convenience store if you forget your sunglasses, you must make trade-offs as to what's absolutely necessary for seven, eight, or nine days of roughing it in dinosaur territory. What do you bring?