Within scant hours of their arrival in San Bernardino, some in the convoy turned around for home.
A convoy of around 130 Ethiopian military lorries got past Islamist positions last week to reach the central Somali town of Baidoa, seat of Somalia's internationally recognised but powerless transitional government.
On July 13th, at about the same time that Mr Putin was sitting down to watch the World Cup final with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, American sources say that a much bigger convoy of around 150 vehicles made the journey.
A convoy of around 600 travellers was making its way to The People's Free Festival at Stonehenge, an annual event that had been running since the mid-1970s.
The convoy turned around, in a stream of brightly lit moving targets through the desert night, shedding vehicles as it went as they sank into the soft desert sand, their drivers cramming themselves into other trucks.
Independent observers, including an OSCE monitoring mission, noticed large military convoys around Donetsk.
They jostled each other in the warehouses, spewing out to sit in glum convoys around the complex's courtyard.
On Tuesday, soldiers in body armor set up command posts at several points in the city after the protesters said they would set out Wednesday in convoys around the city.
The generals thought that better roads would make it easier to move military convoys around in case of attack, as well as to evacuate big cities in a hurry.
