Tuesday was among the busiest days so far this year for lawmakers. Thousands of New Yorkers converged here to lobby them for relief from budget cuts. Meanwhile, both houses of the Legislature passed their own spending plans, and their leaders held their first budget negotiating session.

Yet amid the news conferences, floor debates and shouting protesters, one figure was absent: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Mr. Cuomo, who is in his 11th week as governor, has taken a liking to Albany. He has spent weekends at the Executive Mansion and has showed little interest in retreating back to New York City or elsewhere in the state, as was the habit of his recent predecessors. Which raised the question: Where in the world, or at least in New York State, was Mr. Cuomo?

The mystery — at least to the extent it could be called that — began Monday night, when the governor’s press office released Mr. Cuomo’s public schedule for Tuesday. It said he would be in Essex County, with no public events.

Granted, Essex County is hardly Bermuda. But since Mr. Cuomo took office in January, his public schedule had not previously placed him anywhere other than Albany, Westchester County (where he lives with his girlfriend) or New York City, unless to make a public appearance.

Aides to Mr. Cuomo took pains to avoid having Mr. Cuomo’s day trip turn into a big Albany mystery. One of them — who gave permission for the conversation to be recounted here — gave reporters a heads-up about his plans on Monday night, on the condition that they not report it.

But others at the Capitol inevitably wondered what the governor was doing, and, sure enough, a political blog asked, “Where In NY Is Governor Cuomo?”

On Tuesday afternoon, the not-very-mysterious mystery was solved: a local newspaper, The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, located Mr. Cuomo at a Mobil station in Saranac Lake and posted a picture of him on its Web site to prove it.

In a brief interview as he pumped gas, Mr. Cuomo — wearing blue jeans and a rather sporty pair of sunglasses — said he had taken his daughters skiing at Whiteface Mountain in Wilmington and then spent some time at Saranac Lake.

“We’ve been coming up for 20 years,” Mr. Cuomo told the newspaper. “I really love it and can’t get enough of it.”

An aide to Mr. Cuomo noted that Tuesday was an ideal time for Mr. Cuomo to take a personal day, since lawmakers had been scheduled for weeks to spend the day debating and approving their one-house budgets and Mr. Cuomo has no role in that process.

As for how the governor was found in Essex County, which at about 1,900 square miles is larger than the state of Rhode Island? It turns out that around noon Tuesday, a reporter for The Daily Enterprise spotted a pair of black sport utility vehicles parked outside a bank branch in Saranac Lake, with two members of Mr. Cuomo’s State Police security detail standing nearby.

When the troopers got in the vehicles a few minutes later and drove away, the newspaper decided to follow them and eventually wound up at the Mobil station, where Mr. Cuomo emerged from a Cadillac Escalade and started to fill its tank.

The governor pumped his own gas because the Escalade is a family car, not a state vehicle, his spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said.

Mr. Vlasto, who had to listen to no small number of jokes from reporters on Tuesday about his boss’s workman-casual get-up, added that Mr. Cuomo returned to Albany on Tuesday evening to hold a staff meeting.

Presumably he took off his sunglasses first.

(Source: NY Times / Photos taken by: Peter Crowley/Adirondack Daily Enterprise)