Find what I wrote about our trip to Italy.

Bergen. It has rained since we landed, a fine steady rain that nobody here appears to notice. We have walked the wharf, eaten fish soup twice, and ridden the funicular, where R. spent the whole climb looking at the cable and the track instead of the view and declared it "well maintained."

Every third woman on the street has Aunt Inga's jaw.

I finished "Out Stealing Horses" on the plane. Spare and cold.

It is 10:30 at night and light enough to read at the window. I cannot sleep.

Dingle, in the west of Ireland, in a hotel with a view of a wet field and six sheep. We have been five days in this country and I have not seen a straight road or a dry afternoon.

We are on a coach, with a driver named Declan who talks the whole time. But these are two free days, and R. has hired a small car, against Declan's advice. He is driving on the left with total concentration and both hands, and has asked me not to say "hedge" in that tone. Yesterday we drove out to a chapel built of dry stone, with no mortar, shaped like an upturned boat: twelve hundred years old and not a drop coming through the roof. He went round it twice and then stood inside with his hand flat on the wall for some time.

Birds: gannets diving off the headland, choughs with red legs, a stonechat on a fencepost. Three new.

Sogndal, with Judy. Astrid Fardal found us through the parish book: her great-grandmother and Grandma Ingeborg were sisters, and she has had us to stay for four nights in a house above the fjord with a grass roof on the woodshed. Her husband drove us up to the farm on Thursday and to the old stave church on Friday.

I wore the sølje. I pinned it on at breakfast and walked up the hill in it, the last part on foot, and stood in the yard where she would have stood. Astrid's mother, who is ninety-one, looked at it and said the name of the silversmith in Bergen, and said that her own grandmother chose it and sent it over in 1921, when Ingeborg wrote that she had a bunad sewn at last and nothing to pin it with.

I had always been told "her sister." Nobody in Wisconsin had the year.

Judy cried at the church. I did not, and then did, at supper, over the cucumber salad, which was Mom's.

On a train in the Canadian Rockies, the sixth day of ten. We sit at a table for four with a glass roof over us and are fed every two hours.

R. has not looked at a mountain since we boarded. He has looked at the railway: the spiral tunnels, where the line doubles back on itself inside the rock to gain height. He had a man in the vestibule draw it for him. He has explained it twice to our table companions, Corinne and Hal from Arizona. Corinne quilts.

Snow on the peaks in June, and a lake the color of the inside of a marble. Birds, today alone: a harlequin duck on a river as white as milk, a dipper again, the American one, and a Clark's nutcracker on the top of a spruce at the level of the window. Three new, and the nutcracker is number 300. I told Corinne, and she told the car. I have kept the list since 1978.

On the Douro, in Portugal, the fourth day on the boat. The river runs in a gorge with vineyards cut into both walls in terraces, every one held up by a dry stone wall, and R. has been on the top deck since Saturday with the binoculars, looking not at the birds but at the walls. He is estimating the miles of them. He and a man named Stu from Minnesota talked their way down into the engine room yesterday and came up an hour later smelling of diesel, very happy.

We go through locks. One of them lifts the whole boat more than a hundred feet in a concrete box, in the dark, with water running down the walls. I did not care for it. R. stood at the rail with his hand on the wet concrete as it went by.

Porto was blue tiles on every church, and a bookshop with a red staircase that I was allowed to look at for ten minutes with two hundred other people. I bought a tile from a woman who paints them, a swallow, for the kitchen.

Birds: a hoopoe, at last, on a vineyard post, crest up; bee-eaters; a kingfisher from the cabin window at breakfast. Eight new. The list is at 311.