Murphy is a bitch.
So this morning at 5:00 AM my wife, daughter, and myself left Atlanta bound for Miami. We didnt even get out of the drive way before the cars headlights quit. I found the problem but count get the part to repair it. We waited til it was light then hit the road. Made it here in one piece in the daylight. 
I found the problem before we left. It seems that Mercury buts what is called a Lighting Controle Module on the 2004 Grand Marquise that among other things has the high and low beams running thru it. When the lights are out a sharp whack with the butt of my pocket knife brings the lights back on for a while. Looks like a sticky or dirty contacts on a relay in there. Guess I gotta find one tomorrow. 
I went on a beer run when we got here. That was fun.
this is GRM. You should have just used a pair of mag-lites...
Even that's too expensive. Buy some bulbs and switches at radioshack, find some aluminum pipe, and make your own mag-lites!
mndsm
HalfDork
7/16/10 10:16 p.m.
No way- that's not creative enough. You need to retrofit some electric coleman lanterns you found in the trunk of a derilect you adopted and fabricate projectors out of an eBay set of Honda headlights.
Freebie Harbor Freight flashlights FTW.
Set off signal flares every few hundred feet to indicate your presence and trajectory.
Use the above mentioned aluminum pipe to build a launcher, and shoot the flares ahead to indicate your presence. You should get noticed.
The "lighting control module" on my Continental went bad too. Rather than shell out $500+ for a replacement, I took the thing apart.
The only problem was a bad solder joint where the terminal met the PC board. Mine was an easy, cheap fix.
A coil of wire and I would have been set. I didnt want to hack together a fix for a car I was making a long trip with my wife and child in. A new module at the stealership and 5 minutes under the dash and I was done. The stealership parts dept was great. They gave me a new one for less than a reman from Rockauto. It was the one in Delray Beach.
