How long to reach player level 30?

For those who are, how long did it take you? I'm only 19 at the moment and the progress bar seems to move SO slowly>.>

I really want to put custom tack on my ponies XD

I'm not actually at 30 yet, only 26.5, but I've been locked fairly consistently for most of my horses since the summer. I was moving very quickly up through the ranks with over 300 horses though! I use mostly shows on my main herds and Riding School for a contingent of Geldings (30 of them!) and my retired horses, group lessons give the most EXP, though the least money. Then I have letters denoting the grade of the horse in their names so as I go through training I can change arenas to one that fits the horses in order to get Max EXP (though I'm still leveling my last two to International, so I've been dumping everyone in one arena ;] ).
In order to get more EXP I highly recommend just using a bunch of random horses, all in the same discipline(for simpler entering), and just training them and putting them in the riding school. If they're all the same discipline it's much easier to power through entering in a Riding school of the same discipline(EXP bonus!), and an arena of the proper grade and discipline. Personally I've assigned all mine Sugar Cubes just to get rid of the darned things since I don't care what their stats look like as long as they get me EXP and money xD.

Eventually you'll get there though! It will just feel like forever with smaller herds(not that yours is small, but it's not super big either). Good Luck!

Haha Sab, omg I couldn't even imagine taking care of 300+ ponies how do you do it XD

Thanks for the tips! I'll definitely be creating a bunch of random ponies just for the sake of the riding school then :D I feel like at 19 I have such a long slog to go XD

er I don't anymore... lol. No but it's actually fairly easy if you have a good system and almost 100 of those were just the junk ponies, so sometimes I would just forget about them! Also Locking is your best friend! With different divisions it's so easy to just lock one or two if you don't have the time for everyone, though then I'm always tempted to lock more often so it's harder to progress then. And I totally always use Autoshow, I'm way too lazy to handshow most of the time.

I feel like it's taking an eternity but I'm also really bad about forgetting to show.

I think it took me a couple of months? That was showing 300+ horses daily and before training was introduced. I shot to level 30 from 27 after training was put in place.

When the recode happened I came in at lvl 10 (so on Feb. 13th) and on April the 7th I finally got to lvl 30. I was the second, or third person, to hit lvl 30 on the recode. I did it by showing every day (300+ horses) and training horses, until that function was gone and I had to rely completely on showing.

If you want to progress quickly buy yourself 100, or so, foundation horses from the RC and enter them in shows with the Lowest Entries since winning is what gives you experience points and you won't care about stats for those horses; also don't forget to train your horses every day. It will be very expensive but it should move you along fairly quickly.