But then, RSpec completely stumped me.
Thanks to the folks at StackOverflow, because this post, explains my problem exactly. After multiple tries, my test just wouldn't work. But with this explanation, I started wondering how the "click_link ...." test was working. Then it hit me: each "click_link" represents a user click, so the following test is now looking at the new page (just "clicked") and not the path I had specified above. AHA!
Very interesting (and, sadly, unintuitive for the newbie).