I think my Norn mesmer is up to Level 49 now, simply by exploring the various Level 1-15 areas off of each major city fully. Leveling is easy. Leveling your crafting skill, now that's hard, well annoying at least. And you thought unlocking the crafting table in CoH was tedious work.
Crafting in GW2 is extremely easy. Basically, they work like this:
Everything aside from Jewelcrafting & Cooking: Discover recipes for the cheapest things you can make. Level up your crafting doing this until 375, at which point use karma recipes for Rare equipment (preferably stuff you can use or sell) to hit 400.
Jewelcrafting: Ingots, ingots, ingots. If you have a full stack of ore (250) you can easily get 15-20 crafting levels just from making the appropriate ingots. From there make certain you craft 10 or settings while you get XP for them, as well as the bands & hooks to go with them. Then discover recipes using the gems you have until you have either gotten to a new tier or have to repeat items. Don't forget to engrave/gild etc. with the filigree and then craft with the filigreed gems. If you have to repeat, go with earrings as they are the cheapest to make resource-wise. At 375 you're again going to start relying upon karma recipes, but they are stinkin' expensive to make. Only make things that you're going to use here, or can sell well, because they're too expensive to let go to waste.
Cooking: Cooking is all about repetition. Starting out you're going to want to make sure you have 250 sticks of butter - you'll go through every last bit of it. Make at least 100 balls of dough - you'll need more, of course. From then on it's discovering things that you can make relatively cheaply and in bulk. Generally this revolves around different fruits (Strawberries, Blackberries, etc) which you use to make Cookies for 25 levels, then Tarts for 25 levels, then Pie Fillings and Pies for the 25 levels. If you have the ingredients you can go from 1-400 in about 20 minutes. Cooking is different from the others in that you don't get the bulk of your experience from discovery but from repetition of recipes, so keep that in mind.
I generally go with Cooking on all of my characters to level them up some before switching to one appropriate tradeskill and Jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafting is another of my leveling skills that I use a lot.
I rather enjoy crafting in the game, if for no other reason than it's relaxing to do while you just chat with friends or listen to music... and your characters still progress.