For your third major project in this class, you will choose between writing a travel essay or a city essay (of about 2000 words). Whichever option you choose, you will need to conduct new research and write up new experiences. A "travel essay" differs from a memoir in that a travel essay presents new travel. Your family trip to the UP when you were nine would not qualify as travel writing.
For both of these options (travel and city) you will need to conduct some secondary and primary research.
One caution about travel writing -- these should be NEW experiences. Don't write about your trip last year to Disney World or your favorite childhood vacation or something like that. If you're planning a trip over the next couple of weeks, you could take fieldnotes about that experience to turn into a travel writing piece. If you'd prefer to write about your summer vacations as a child to the Upper Peninsula, think of that as a city/place-based essay rather than a travel writing piece, where you'll need to do research on that area and bring in various perspectives toward that site.
If you look back in Chapter 2 of Creating Nonfiction, you'll see Bradway and Hesse describing the city essay as typically "tougher, blunter, more cynical, and often funnier than most place-based writing" though they go on to point out that in more recent years they seem to reflect more of a tone of "melancholy and anger" (25). You can see some of that melancholy and anger is McMahan's piece on Detroit, humor in Sedaris's reflection on Santa Barbara, and cynicism and dark humor in Thompson's piece on the Kentucky Derby.