Yup. You can travel anywhere, you just need to know roughly where you are going (but you don't need to be intimately acquainted with the area you are going to - you just need to know where it is, roughly).

The thing that is hard about creating a gateway is the first hole. You have to know everything about where you are to make that first hole into the pattern correctly (unless you don't care where you're going).

 

However when you get to the other side of the gate there is already a hole in the pattern there, which you've just stepped through. You use that hole (the backside of the previous gate) as the reference for the new hole. You're copying the weave that you just did.

 

The purpose of the first jump is to get the backside of the first gate to copy from. It could literally be a hole to anywhere, but the concept of the short first jump is so that you jump to somewhere safe.

(unless you don't care where you're going).

Even then. See my post up-thread.