Can’t take a trip to France to look at the famous sights? Never fear! There is an Eiffel Tower in Texas!
The Eiffel Tower of Texas is topped with a Cowboy Hat…. because of course it is.

I stopped to visit it on a 2 day long camping road trip. My stops on this trip included: Cooper Lake State Park, Sulphur Springs, and Paris Texas – to see the Eiffel Tower.

COOPER LAKE STATE PARK

Cooper Lake State Park is in the north semi east portion of Texas. About 1.5hrs northeast of Dallas.
There are two parts to the park. The northern shore has the Cooper Lake Doctors Creek Unit, and the southern shore has the Sulphur Springs Headquarters.

On this visit, I camped at the southern unit, closer to Sulphur Springs.

What does this park offer?
According to the TPWD website you can:
fish, picnic, swim, boat, paddle, water-ski, hike, bike, bird watch, study nature, stargaze, ride horses, geocache, and camp.
If you don’t have an RV or want to tent camp, there are also screened in shelters and cabins you can stay in.

What did I do while I was there?
Hike, camp, and “study nature” (unintentionally, but we’ll get to that later).

It’s $5 to enter, unless you’re under 12 (then it’s free). I use the $70/yr Texas State Parks Pass.

For camping, I picked a spot in the Deer Haven camping area. There was a flat pad for parking (perfect for someone who sleeps in their van but doesn’t necessarily need hookups… even though there were plenty of spots with hookups, if needed), and it was close enough to the water to see from camp. Every spot on the waterfront side had little paths to go to the waters edge.

There were bathrooms, showers, and everything was really lovely all around the park. If you’d like to read strictly about my camping experience, I’ll be posting separately about just that with all the details.

There are 15+ miles of hiking trails you can explore which is basically key to my state park stops. I’m not really big on fishing or anything like that, and don’t have a boat… so trails are my must haves.
They do close down trails if the conditions are too wet like many parks do, so always double check the weather before heading out.

I’ll get into a little more detail about these hikes, as well as my first ever run in with wild boars in a different post, with all the trail details.

DAY 1:

We found our camping spot and settled in for snacks, before wandering the park to explore and hiking the Little Bluestem Loop.

This was a shorter trip, only camping for 1 night so we didn’t pack a big cooler or anything to cook. Instead we opted to head into Sulphur Springs. I LOVE exploring little towns to see what they offer. This ended up being quite the experience.

SULPHUR SPRINGS

Sulphur Springs Texas sits about a 15 minute drive from the park, with a population of around 15k. THEY EVEN HAD A BREWERY!!! This town was cute. Unfortunately, it also left a lot to be desired in the way of miscommunication, hours, signage, and all sorts of stuff that ended up being a headache.

First stop: Backstory Brewing… sort of. I made sure to google this place to see what time they closed on Sundays. The answer was 6pm. It even said 6pm on the front door. Perfect, plenty of time! We got there just after 3:30pm. It was quiet.

After waiting near the bar for around 5 minutes a girl finally came out, surprised to see us. She said they close at 4 on Sundays now, BUUT she was nice enough that she said she’d pour us a beer in plastic cups and we could still enjoy it outside.
Without letting us see any type of menu, she asked what we wanted to drink. Brandt asked for a hazy IPA, I ended up with a sour.

I will say this… our beers were delicious. I really wish we could have had more!! While signing the ticket I asked her if she could recommend any nearby restaurants.
Beertender: “The food truck outside”
Me: “If you’re closing, wouldn’t they be closed?”
Beertender: “I don’t know. They’re good. Look what they made me” (she holds up food).
Me: “great, but if they aren’t serving food anymore, where ELSE would you recommend we go to sit down for a beer and dinner?”
Beertender: just stares at me in awkward silence until finally saying “THE FOOD TRUCK”

Awesome. Sooo food truck!
… which was closing and already had almost everything off. We politely said no thank you to the pork rinds they offered and went to sit with our beers.
5 minutes later they brought us pork rinds, saying that we couldn’t leave without eating something from there. I only ate one pork rind, because pork rinds. lol. They were probably delicious, just not my jam when it comes to food.

I do understand we somehow landed there at close even though everything said they’d be open… and that’s not on the bartender… but ooooph. As a bartender myself… well, just… yeah.

Next stop, trying to ACTUALLY find dinner.
Not much was open on a Sunday, as is normal in Texas smaller towns. I found a high rated place called Caps & Flasks and we set off.

At this point, I think the town was just out to make sure I didn’t get to enjoy dinner.
We could not figure out where this place was. Going up and down the street, there were zero signs for the place. One door said “here’s 2 us” on the front. It didn’t say Caps & Flasks anywhere on it. There were two young girls sitting at a table outside smoking who obviously worked at that place. I stood there looking at my phone, confused and out loud talking about it to Brandt.

The girls both snickered and laughed under their breath at us. I was about to turn and ask them for help when two young boys walked around the corner. The girls INSTANTLY jumped up, started giggling at them and fawning over them, pushed past us and went in with them.

Welp, that takes care of that, I guess we’re going around the corner to Muddy Jakes and having wings.
If you couldn’t tell, I was pretty frustrated at this point. I didn’t even figure out that the place with no signs WAS the place I was looking for until getting home and googling them and looking at photos of it.

I think it was about halfway through this meal when my frustration gave way to maniac style laughter at the whole situation. Our waitress refused to address me at all. She refilled Brandt’s drink multiple times, walked away if I asked for one, only looked at him, and when I was able to ask for extra napkins, she “YES MA’AM!!!”d me. LOL
Y’all… this really wasn’t my town or day I guess. Whaaaat a mess.

Walking the town square after that brightened my mood though, for 2 reasons.
1 – OH MY GOOOOSH LOOK AT THIS WIZARD OF OZ SET UP!!!
2 – public bathrooms. Weird thing to get excited about, yeah I know. These things were legit though! From the outside it looked like a giant box made out of mirrors. It’s all one way glass! From the inside, you could see EVERYTHING outside. Very cool, if not also slightly terrifying to use.

Back to camp for the night. This day was crazy!
A few hours of campfire coziness, listening to the coyotes howl, and I think we both fell asleep pretty easily.

DAY 2:
Started this day out with a hike on the Coyote Run trail. We assumed it was labeled this way due to coyotes. Imagine my surprise when we were hit with the choice of deciding if we wanted out fate in the hands of a lot of wasps, or a family of wild hogs!

After this hike, it was time to pack up to go back home.
Heading north to get on 82, we made a bit of an out of the way stop to Paris, Texas…

Eiffel Tower in Texas

Paris is always supposed to be home to the Eiffel Tower, right? That means that the Eiffel Tower is in Texas! They did it TEXAS style though, and added a cowboy hat to the top. YEEHAW!

This bad boy [slaps tower] sits 65 feet in height. You can not climb to the top of this Texas Eiffel Tower, which made me sad.

I really do have an issue with how far out of the way I’m willing to drive for a funky roadside attraction. It’s an addiction.
How many people can officially say “I did chin ups on the Eiffel Tower”? Probably not many. Why did I do that for a photo? Simply put, I’m a weirdo.

They also had a War Veterans Memorial right next to the tower. Worth a walk through to check out. While we didn’t stop at the museum, there is also a museum in town that seems to pop up on a lot of travel guides called the Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site.

That’s it. I wish I could have done an ENTIRE post on JUST the Eiffel Tower in Texas, but uh… I really can’t think of anything else I could possibly mention about it?
If you’re in the area, it’s a cool stop.
If you’re not. Well, road trips are fun!

Paris did seem like it would be a cute town to explore. Unfortunately we came through on a Sunday, so there wasn’t a whole lot open.
For a late lunch, we stopped at Scholls BBQ. I recommend the potato salad casserole.

Then on the way back through, we thought we’d try our luck with another brewery and hit a Gainesville TX place called Krootz.
Very rustic building, that looks like it’s well loved by the locals. Halfway through my flight, the owner came out and greeted us.
Then talked to my boyfriend. Tried talking beer to him. He kept saying “I’m just along for the ride, she’s the one who works in a brewery, loves beer, and can talk beer with you.” The guy looked at me, then back at Brandt, and asked him “hey do you want a lil tour? Let’s walk around!”
I just laughed and sat my happy ass there with my flight.

We really enjoyed one of the beers we tried… so I ordered a crowler of it to go. Then watched our bartender hold it with her hand INSIDE the can to write on it, then put her hand even further into the can to wave it around and dry the marker before filling it with beer. No co2 purge.

I had already lost it and laughed pretty hard the night before at dinner about how this whole short trip was going… and particularly my luck anywhere we tried to go for food/drinks.

At that point, I wasn’t even upset. I just giggled, hoped the alcohol in the beer might kill any germs in the can I was taking home, and finished sipping my beer quietly… whispering to Brandt that we’d HAVE to drink that beer we were bringing home in the next day or two.

Some trips are fun. Some are funny. Some are lovely. And some exist just to remind you the universe has a sense of humor.

Have you been to the Eiffel Tower? How about the one in Texas? The one in Arkansas? How many towers exist?!
Anyway, here’s the actual city webpage with some info on it. YEEEEEHAWWWW.