I just read a thread on time travel and wanted an opinion. If you went back a significant distance in time, but did it in a location where you could not see, hear or smell any difference (forest, desert, whatever), do you think you could sense or feel a difference? Would you exit your time travel device and instantly know something was different?
I’m not a sci-fi kind of person, but this one had me wondering.
We always ask the age old question: What would it feel like if you could enter your body in a parallel universe where you hadn’t discovered beer? 
Given that time travel is generally considered to be impractical at best, and that almost everything about it lives in the land of the hypothetical, I must respectfully suggest that there isn’t anything resembling a concrete answer to this question.
lost4life, if questions about the effects of time travel intrigue you, perhaps you’re more of a “sci-fi kind of person” than imagined.
I agree with Cervaise that the whole subject is riddled with unknowns and hypotheticals (particularly at the level of sophistication portrayed by mass media).
One valid underlying cause for speculation about time travel is that it provides people an opportunity to ask “What If?” That’s an extremely valuable game to play, since we’re constantly having to play “What If?” games about our own future.
Answering your OP question, there are plenty of science fiction stories where the change caused by time travel are recognized in part – or are recognized by some people. (I can imagine an amusing story arising from someone calling themselves “lost4life” discovering their diploma from a seminary hidden in a drawer.)
There are good resources on the first page of results in Google by searching on:
“time travel” books
To answer the original question, I can’t think of any reason to suppose that you’d sense anything different. In fact, by definition, if there was no difference perceptible to your senses, you wouldn’t sense it. Now, there might be subtle differences which you would sense without realizing what you were sensing (slightly different gas mixture in the air of centuries ago, etc.) but that’s a different question.
You might feel a sort of “jet lag” if the moment in time you arrive in is at a different time of day or season of the year that the time you left. (i.e. You use the time machine at 11 a.m. on September 20, 2002, and arrive at 6:30 p.m. on May 1, 1904.) But that wouldn’t be anything extraordinary.
Maybe if you went REALLY far back, and stayed around after sunset, the stars might look a little different. Even just 5,000 years ago, as I seem to recall that Earth’s “North Star” was different, but I don’t know if a casual observer wouldn even notice a difference.
Then there’s always changes in local flora and fauna if you go back far enough…In the right place, you might see some Passenger Pigeons in the early 20th century, or run across some Wooly Rhinos giving you curious looks towards the end of the ice age.