He had been planning Luna's birthday since January.
The principle was the same one he applied to all the gifts and occasions he thought carefully about: work from what he knew about the person outward. What he knew about Luna Lovegood was considerable by this point — two years of proximity, a term of training sessions, the specific texture of her attention and the things that produced genuine delight in her rather than the performed version.
Luna found things interesting rather than exciting. She found beauty in the specific rather than the spectacular. She had a particular relationship with the unfamiliar — not the tourist's relationship, which was about novelty as consumption, but the naturalist's, which was about understanding. She would enjoy an amusement park not primarily for the rides, Ron suspected, but for the specific quality of a place designed to make people feel something and the question of how it went about doing that.
He had also judged that Luna Lovegood had spent enough of her life being treated as someone whose preferences were either indulged or managed, and that what a birthday for her specifically required was a day on which she was simply taken somewhere good and allowed to be entirely herself in it.
He wrote to his father in the second week of January.
The letter asked for one specific piece of Muggle information — the location of Alton Towers and how to get there from the nearest Floo connection point — and was phrased in the way he phrased things to his father when he wanted genuine engagement rather than parental concern. His father wrote back within two days with the information, a hand-drawn map of the route from Uttoxeter station, and three paragraphs about the history of Muggle mechanical amusement that were genuinely informative and entirely characteristic.
The logistics took two weeks to arrange. The Floo connection he needed was at the Hanged Man, a wizarding pub in Uttoxeter that permitted outgoing connections for a small fee. The return was the same route in reverse. The Marauder's Map meant Harry could confirm the timing of the castle's least-observed exits, which he did on a Thursday evening with the focused efficiency of someone who had been waiting for a task that made use of a specific tool.
He told Luna on the twelfth.
'Tomorrow is your birthday,' he said. 'We're going somewhere. Leave time in the morning to get dressed for being outside all day.'
Luna looked at him with the quality she brought to information she was receiving and connecting to other things simultaneously. 'Outside,' she said.
'All day,' he confirmed.
She considered this. 'Will there be things to look at?'
'Quite a lot of things,' he said.
She nodded once, with the satisfaction of someone whose requirements had been met. 'Alright,' she said, and went back to whatever she had been reading, and he went back to the second task preparation, and February continued.