lalunette
+1y
Several years ago I was driving to our family cottage in my 1990 Dodge Caravan when something similar happened. The last hour and a half of road is Provincial Road 314 and is all gravel and quite isolated (on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg). Anyhow, I have been driving this road since it was opened in the early eighties and I know when to slow down for difficult turns, etc. so I only really need to brake hard when I encounter traffic.
Anyhow, we were about 20 minutes away from the cottage when I came up behind another vehicle who was taking the road really slow, probably new to the area because these people are usually terrified by the twists and turns of the road and therefore drive like grannies. So I go to brake and... nothing !!! I ended up swerving around the car in front of me and letting the van slow down on its own. Pumping the brakes gave me absolutely nothing and I couldn't use the e-brake because I knew it was rusty and might lock the rear wheels if I used it.
The last 20 minutes of the trip was fun since I used my knowledge of the road to slow the van around turns. When I got to the cottage (on a slope beside the lake) I simply drove up the hill to the cottage, slowing down to the point where I could put the van in park.
Ends up a rock busted the brake line where it connected to the left rear wheel. Unfortunately I could not do an in-site repair so I used the radio telephone to call a tow truck.
This happened twice that summer and, the second time, I simply drove to the nearest town (40 minutes away) without brakes, shifting the automatic tranny into low gear once I was in town. The local mechanic had everything fixed up in about 30 minutes and chatted with us the whole time, letting his hands seemingly work on their own.
We found out from the mechanic that the highway dept. had used too large a grade of gravel on the road earlier that summer and this was causing all kinds of problems for drivers (flats, cracked windshields, busted brake lines, etc.). It never happened again... and I've been going to the family cottage for 41 years.