First, thank you all for the great tips and advice. It was much easier to go into the LBS today armed with some knowledge--even if it is just knowledge about what to expect!

Since it was raining yesterday I decided to postpone my trip until today. Unfortunately, even with the sun shinning it was a pretty unproductive trip.

I went armed with a list of questions, a notebook and pen. There was one guy working the floor and couple in the back repair area. The guy working floor, after asking what I wanted, told me I needed a road bike and then followed with "but I don't know anything about road bikes so you need to come back and talk to someone else".

He then pointed me to a huge binder of bikes and told me to look through it. So I declined looking at the pictures (I'm still at the stage where all bikes look the same to me) and asked when the person who does know about road bikes would be in (next Tuesday). So I'll go back then--and try another shop in the mean time.

Hopefully my visit next Tuesday will be more productive!