The major destinations for the Long Trips between 1937 and 1941 were coal and steel areas of Pennsylvania. Students observed a working mill during the 1939 and 1940 trips.
Dr. Salvatore Vascellaro's dissertation includes interviews with participants from the 1940 Long Trip. He writes: "For Sarah Underhill Nafe (1940 Q) 'the actual steel factory floor overrode all other impressions': 'The vastness, the gray atmosphere and machinery, contrasted by the explosive vivid orange flames, hot orange cores of steel, the noise, the danger, all quite staggering.' Jean Ewing (1940 I) found the experience 'horrifying': 'I remember that the blast furnace was so terribly hot, it made an indelible impression.'...Sarah Underhill...realized these were problems the students 'could only guess' at: 'The world indeed had corners we had not experience before.' Like the students of the first Long Trip, many felt that their familiar ways of thinking 'got so shaken up,' that the complexity of what they had experienced left them with no neatly-tied package of ideas 'ready to be pigeon-holed'" (p. 170-172).