Bicycle Basket

While out doing some glass collecting one day, I thought I would try my luck in Temple Bar in Dublin City Centre.  The Temple Bar district is like the New Orleans French Quarter, Dublin style: a neighborhood with an interesting and diverse history taken over by touristy kitsch and wild party bars.  Temple Bar is the place for the Stag and Hen Dos (a do is what the English [UKish?  Great British?  I don't know what to call these people!] call a party... don't ask me why) and a place of pilgrimage for most visitors.  I thought it might be a great place to pick up some glasses left over from the wild parties (dos!?) of the young twentysomethings trolling the alleys every night.

Turns out the pubs in Temple Bar are smart enough not to give drunk partiers (doers!?) real glasses.  I found a boatload of plastic cups with Guinness, Heineken, and Carlsberg logos all over the street, but no glasses.  The day turned out not to be a total loss when I saw this guy on the sidewalk near a toppled-over trash can.

Twisted Metal Black

This closeup was taken after I had dragged it home and started the repair process, but it might be identified as a bicycle rack!  Right there in the trash!  It was, to be fair, crushed and bent almost beyond repair in the trash pile.  The rack clearly was supposed to be mounted on the front handle bar, but the mounting bracket was missing altogether.  The potential I saw with it was not in the front, but bolted to the rear rack of my own bike.  First, it needed some structural support.

Shoelaces hold it together

After bending the wires of the frame back into a mostly square shape, I reinforced the sides with a shoelace I found while out on another walk on another day.  The lace holds closed the gap left by the broken mounting bracket, as seen in the above photo.  A piece of wire I found on the seashore adds more support to the mounting gap.

Today, many weeks after finding and installing it on my bike with plastic zip ties (not pictured), the rack is still in service and holding weight like a champ.  Now when I go fishing I don't need to bring along our big backpack, and when I ride my bike to work, I can put my suit in a plastic bag and throw it in here for the ride.  This lends further credence to the classic Ron Swanson line...