I spent a Sunday turning the roof of my Mini into a second trunk.
The car is great at being small. That is most of its charm. It is less charming when I want to carry beach bags, camping gear, a bike, and anything else that does not want to cooperate with the back seat.
I already had the crossbars and a closed carrier. The closed box worked, but it always felt like a large permanent answer to a problem I only had some of the time. I wanted something simpler, so I bought an open Yakima cargo cage.
I asked for help putting it on. The timing did not work out, and by late afternoon I had the cage mounted anyway. I took a picture from behind the car because the new setup looked enormous from that angle. The Mini had suddenly developed an upstairs.
The nice part was that the cage did not decide what it was for. A weatherproof bag could go in it. So could a cooler, an awkward box, or whatever sandy thing I did not want inside the car. When I did not need it, there was no giant black shell sitting on the roof.
That same evening I was making plans to head to the beach. I left a black duffel by the door for anything that needed to come along and tried to work out how to leave directly from a friend's place.
The cage had been installed for only a few hours and I was already assigning it jobs.
This is how most of my gear purchases go. I buy one thing to solve one obvious problem, then immediately start testing how many other problems it can absorb. Sometimes that produces a drawer full of adapters. This time it produced a tiny car with a useful second floor.