Thank you much, Claudio! That was the ticket. I had put my depend on mpe0 in the wrong place. I was mostly using your mpls example. Dumb questions: Why do you not create a default route in rdomain 1 on the 2nd PE in your mpls example network? Why do you not have network 0.0.0.0/0 on the 2nd PE? Thanks for helping me with my understanding gaps.
Matt