routes to failover/redundant line

[H5TECH-IT]

hi

We have a remote site, connected through a direct line with our main office. We are currently routing the traffic from a specific vlan through a static route. This is a procurve 5412zl switch. we would like to put in place a VPN tunnel as a failover, through our firewall.
any ideas on how to perform this?
tried:
ip route 10.88.88.0 255.255.255.0 10.89.89.10 --static route to remote site
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.5.5.2  --default route to the firewall
when i disable the interface that forwards the traffic to 10.89.89.10, it does not fall back to the default route.
Tried to set the administrative distance for the firewall, by creating another static rule, as below, but still does not seem to failover.
ip route 10.88.88.0 255.255.255.0 10.89.89.10 --static route to remote site
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.5.5.2 distance 2  --static route to failover to firewall
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.5.5.2  --default route to the firewall

Any ideas?

Also is there a logical probing that we could put in place, e g pinging 10.89.89.10 and multiple fails would disable the route, failing over to the default route?

Thanks
Kostas