[Vince, Pt. II]

So I'm looking for a clarification on two things. The first I'm about 99% certain I'm right, but looking for support. The second I have no idea on.

1. Longest Trip in Ticket to Ride.
This is the longest continuous path of train cars, correct? One of our players was arguing that you cannot depart from the same city more than once on your trip. One of the players had four separate departures from Omaha, and the western side of their train looped, so you could continuously go from the east coast, to Omaha, to the west coast and then back to the east coast (via Omaha a second time) without counting the same train cars twice. My (firm) position was that each one of those train cars counted.

2. Arkham Horror - Earning an "Explored" token from going through a gate.
There are several ways (Spells, encounter results, Items) that an investigator can "Immediately return to Arkham" while in another world. If you return via this method, do you earn an 'Explored' token? I'm really not sure about this one. If you do, it seems that these abilities/spells/etc are extremely powerful - then again, they're fairly rare, so perhaps they are supposed to be that powerful. Then again, if you do NOT, they seem incredibly weak - I can see very few instances where I'd actually want to use them.

We're still pretty green in our Arkham experience, and I've found several things that seem underpowered that I'm sure I just haven't explored enough yet (Silver Twilight Lodge and becoming the Deputy being two of them) to fully understand their strengths. Right now, these seem to fall into that category (we haven't been playing that they grant an Explore token).