remembered how easy it was to fix a bumper on my 1968 volkswagen beetle and decided to at least investigate.
Speaking of bumpers, we were hit by a Vespa in our V70 summer before last in southern France. I was making a left turn and the Vespa driver decided to overtake me. She hit us at perhaps 210° just by the left front wheel, and was -- short of a few bruises -- unhurt. The force pushed the entire front, which includes the visible parts of the bumper, off the car, and put a few dents in the fender and the hood. So, there I was, on the French Riviera, in 40° heat, trying to patch the car up for a 2000+ km drive home. Your story matches mine in many things. I always carry a pretty complete tool kit, and more so for long travels. This of course includes soft iron wire, the kind used to lash up rebar. The plastic rivets that hold the upper edge of the grille of course had sheared off completely, so I rigged new tiedowns with the wire, and this repair brought us all the way home.
Once home, I bought new rivets, knocked the dents out of the fender, and used liberal amounts of cyanoacrelate to glue everything back in shape. I had to buy a few pieces of structural plastic; there's a "facelift hook" with a screw that pulls the front backwards and holds it in place on each side inside the wheel well, and it sits on a large plastic skeleton piece. They were pretty bad to start with, and the crash did them over completely, so had to fit new ones. Volvo still have them, in stock. Quite OK for a 20yo car.