Rocinante 🐴 Virtual Cache

In August 2024, my wife (forestmanjoo) and I took our daughters (sweetpea and ohmydarlin) on a three-week, 7,000-mile roadtrip. Two of our stops were locations we spent summers in our youth: Okoboji, Iowa for me and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina for my wife.

In our walks down memory lane, we drove by former homes, ate at favorite restaurants, and visited landmarks that left marks on our hearts. For forestmanjoo, one of those landmarks is an old nag in Nags Head:

Above: forestmanjoo with her mother maaany years ago.

Below: forestmanjoo with her parents and children in 2024.

Logging task for this virtual cache: please post a photo of yourself with the old nag in Nags Head. A piece of paper with your caching name on it is acceptable proof of your visit if you do not wish to show your face in your photo taken at the location. Logs without a photo will be deleted.

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How did the town of Nags Head earn its name? A folkloric explanation claims that mules or horses (nags) would have lights hung on their heads by nefarious wreckers in order to trick ships into running aground and then loot the ships of their valuables. The town's emblem depicts one such equine accomplice from the tale:

The old nag may have a name but we are unaware of one and have taken to calling it "Rocinante" after Don Quixote's horse in the 1605/1615 novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. 

The name is a complex pun. Rocín in Spanish means a work horse or low-quality horse, but can also mean an illiterate or rough man. Ante has several meanings in Spanish and can function as a standalone word as well as a suffix. One meaning is "before" or "previously". Another is "in front of". As a suffix, -ante in Spanish is adverbial; rocinante refers to functioning as, or being, a rocín. "Rocinante", then, follows Cervantes's pattern of using ambiguous, multivalent words, which is common throughout the novel.

Rocinante's name, then, signifies his change in status from the "old nag" of before to the "foremost" steed. As Cervantes describes Don Quixote's choice of name: nombre, a su parecer, alto, sonoro y significativo de lo que había sido cuando fue rocín, antes de lo que ahora era, que era antes y primero de todos los rocines del mundo — "a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world".

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We were surprised to find there wasn't a geocache at this location. The site is 2,398.2 miles from our home location so we're unable to place a physical cache but felt it was nagging for a virtual. Anyway, we hope you enjoy horsing around with the Rocinante, the old nag of Nags Head!

Virtual Rewards 4.0 - 2024-2025

This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between January 17, 2024 and January 17, 2025. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 4.0 on the Geocaching Blog.